Page 76 of Not That Impossible

It was ridiculous. Five hundred words. I could toss out five hundred words in fifteen minutes. I’d timed myself.

Five hundred words about Liam, and dragons, and Space Marines, and Liam, and shagging, and Liam and whatnot.

Icoulddo non-fiction, too. I could.

I flipped through my notebook, jotted a quick outline—ugh this was like school—and told myself to just start.

I ground my laborious way through the article, anxiously watching my word-count progress bar tick up one reluctant percent after the other.

I skimmed it back and winced. It was…hmm. A bit dry? It needed a little something. I needed to punch up the words, really tell astoryhere, really grab the reader.

Zhuzh it up a bit.

I pushed back from the desk, dropped to the floor, and worked through a set of pushups. Physical activity always helped me think.

After the pushups I rolled to my back and did some sit-ups.

Some burpees. V-sits. A few Russian twists. I grabbed my kettlebell and swung it around a bit until I’d really worked up a sweat, and—

Shit.

I rushed back to the computer.

“Ahhhh,” I said when I checked the time. It was half past three. What the fuck?

I re-read my zero draft. It was…honestly, it was too late to restart.

The bones were good?

I gave it some sparkle. Tossed in a few exclamation points, some italics. That made it look more interesting.

I read through it another hundred thousand times, words lost all sense and meaning, and at five to four, I had to face facts.

It was crunch time.

The Word document throbbed at me from the computer screen.

It was absolutely covered with comments and markup. Gritting my teeth, I deleted all the comments and accepted all changes. There were still a lot of red squiggles.

I’d hoped to run it through Grammarly and proofread it before it went, but I was out of time. I didn’t even have long enough to run a spellcheck.

Well, Word got it wrong half the time anyway. There probably weren’t that many mistakes.

“Are we go or no go, Connolly?” I said. “We are ago. Come on. Come oooooon! Yeah! You’ve got this. Wooo!”

I couldn’t believe I just woo-ed myself.

I started a new email to Ralph and attached the document.

“Yeah! Do it! Do it! Hit that button. Press send. Come on, you can do it. Go!”

I pressed the button.

My muscles went tight, my stomach lurched, and I collapsed in a sweating heap.

Good job I was already sitting down.

Wow.

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