I’m experiencing a writer’s block of sorts. This has never really happened to me—I just sit down here in the afternoon sunlight of this lazy town, day after day, and my imaginative mind remains empty. I breathe in the old sawdust of my writing studio (which used to be our garage) and I just slump in my squeaky office chair for about thirty minutes before I end up stepping outside to smoke a cigarette.

My mother is completely unaware that I smoke; I buy the packs from a friend of a friend and smoke when I feel so empty and void of ideas that I must fill myself with toxic fumes to compensate. Honestly, there is nothing better to do in Wisconsin than stand outside in the freezing autumn wind amidst piles of soggy gray leaves and slowly kill yourself with tobacco.

I don’t actually want to die—that was just an exaggeration. No, I only smoke because I am a writer and that is what writers do, at least that’s what I think they do. They smoke heavily in movies, anyway. Regardless, I like how mysterious it looks, so I participate in this pointless ritual, but smoking does not help to relieve my writer’s block. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually help anything.

All I can think about is this gap in my creativity; I hope it ends soon, because I am already fifteen years old and I want to be a published writer as young as possible. I aspire to see my name—Jason Morris—printed under a huge title right in the middle of a big fancy literary magazine or even on the cover of a novel on the bestsellers shelf.

Sadly, I cannot accomplish that anytime soon if this creative block forges on. I have tried to get published multiple times, but I never hear back from the publishing companies. So what if my stories are a little “out there”? That was the past, and this is now. I thought up a great story idea last week about a vampire-slaying half-cat robot woman, but I just can’t figure out how to develop it. Half-cat robot women are pretty complicated, but surely not so much that I should go through five packs of cigarettes in a week? Perhaps my character will end up being so deep and mysterious that readers will feel the similar need to chain smoke just to understand her. I hope to create a character like that someday, but in the meantime, I just pull on my fur-lined coat and stand outside our dilapidated garage for a while.

I kick at grayish brown leaves as I lean against the chipping paint of the soggy garage wall. I think about how obnoxious everyone’s excitement is when they won’t quit babbling about how much they love autumn; I’m tired of hearing about it year after year. The leaves never turn “gold and red” as everyone fantasizes, they turn gray and brown. Everything becomes gray and brown and, quite frankly, ugly. Honestly, everything is dying—what’s so beautiful about that?

Girls especially over-romanticize everything, that’s why they are all so crazy about autumn, the season of dying trees and freezing rain. Actually, girls are just crazy in general. I wish they weren’t; I wish I possessed the courage to actually talk to them, but I cannot make any sense of them, to be honest. This explains why I waste time in my writing studio/garage and write stories about cool vampire-slaying, zombie-hunting women from space. At least the girls in my stories are interesting, even if the ones in real life aren’t.

Seriously, the girls who go to my school are all either really lame, or totally insane. Most of them lean more toward the lame side; they freak out about the next Taylor Swift album, fishtail braids, and every single movie that features Jake Gyllenwhatever. The fact that the majority of the girls who crowd the hallways at my school care so much about such boring and meaningless things is unfortunate, but their obsessions do not affect me much.

What bother me are the insane girls. Insanely pretty, insanely witty, and insanely unattainable girls are the burden of my life. They always smile in my direction—or in the general direction of any guy, I guess. Then sometimes they wink or giggle at my dry humor. They even touch my shoulder with light, manicured fingertips as they throw their head back to laugh at my jokes. How can some girls look like such angels, even when they laugh? Anyway, they make me think I stand a chance with them, and then they break my heart as soon as I spot them holding hands in the hall with another football player or student counsel officer. Those girls are the insane ones. That’s why I choose to just be a writer. Writers are stereotypical loners, and I honestly don’t need more company than that of my cigarette to warm my breath and shield me from the autumn breeze.