Blank White Pages

by Adam J. Whitlatch

If you ask any writer (any at all, take your pick) what the worst part of his craft is, he may pause and consider this for a moment before responding. This is because there are so many obstacles in a writer’s day-to-day life. There’s the ever-lingering doubt that his work is up to par; does my family believe in me or are they just humoring me until I give up and decide to go back to work at my old day job? Rejection letters... now there’s something every writer has to deal with – some on a daily basis – and no matter how many times you hear about Stephen King or J.K. Rowling’s slew of rejection letters before they struck it big you just can’t help but ask yourself, “Is my writing really that fucking terrible?” Then of course there are those days when a new literary magazine comes in the mail and you open it to find that your brilliant masterpiece that you spent weeks polishing and revising – the envy of all your coffee house frequenting writer friends - was passed up in favor of some poorly edited, half-baked piece of drivel entitled “My Boyfriend is an Alien” that was probably pounded out in five minutes by the fiction editor’s thirteen-year-old autistic nephew. All of these drain on a writer’s sanity of course, but nothing - and I mean nothing - enrages authors more than a goddamned blinking cursor on a blank white page.

6S

Adam J. Whitlatch would like to dedicate this piece to his good friend Joseph Grant. Adam is the author of numerous short stories, the novel “The Blood Raven: Retribution," and the novels-in-progress “E.R.A. – Earth Realm Army” and “The Weller: Tales of the Wastelands." (Adam's complete works on 6S can be found here.)