An author dies the tenth time

When her pages start blank, stay blank, stare at her, blank, with no promise of another life, when it all reaches a thousand seconds and minutes of nothingness.

The white page Is a devil.

Just yesterday she had written her characters so deep in love that she'd tear up if one cried. She watched them kiss with their lips sealing each other's like a love-scented letter. They talked to her like friends long-forgotten, acquaintances craving for her attention to whisper to her in low words: listen, if you don't mind, I have a small story to tell you. And then both of them would have coffee in a small, broken-down shop while her Tyron, her very own Tyron, tells her how he'd love Amelia to the moon and back, and how he had dragged himself through wars and army to come back to see his wife with a new bundle of joy - a bundle who was three years too old to call a bundle. He had become a father not through birth but through toddler steps. He'd tell you how his son wouldn't fall asleep unless he sang. Tyron would tell you more.

And one day, he vanishes. Because no one cared about Tyron. They tell you your story isn't marketable. Your story doesn't sit right. Your writing is bland. It's draggy. Your plot pacing is wrong. You didn't hit the midpoint correctly. Your characters are 2D. Your romance is too fast to catch up to. Your plot is too convoluted. No one wants to read about an old man. No one cares. You've lost 1,2,3,4,5,ten, twenty, another one, two, another five, god-knows-how-many times. They give you ghostly and ghastly sneers from a dark, bark alley.

An author dies when her story dies. An author dies when her story is killed before it blooms, like a poppy getting its petals ripped. An author dies when her characters disappear, slowly like a misty fog in late December.

An author dies.

An author dies in ten ways.