He turned and looked out the window, not for the first time that morning and demanded inspiration from the grey, cloudy sky. Writing was never this difficult before but this time he was writing a masterpiece. Having set his sights on a suitable target, he was now going to achieve it along with immortality, that level of the human hierarchy that is simply a remembered name.

Turning back to the page, he counted the lines and despaired once more of ever being anything but an average author. It paid his bills and enabled him to spend the odd evening at the pubs, but he couldn’t take his girlfriend out to a decent place and his aspirations in the literary canon were nowhere near fruition.

There was so much writing coming out in the current post-modern spurt of opportunism and yet he was struggling to gather the discrete fragments that could build a workable post-modern masterpiece.

He glanced at the computer screen which he currently wasn’t using and noticed that it had taken him three hours to write one page. Inspiration was a dirty word according to the post-modern gurus and the inner sanctum of the movement that presided over and judged the merits of any and every scribe.

Aiming for posterity with a novel could be anathema to the very tenets of the post-modern philosophy just like there was no history, and maybe just maybe, aiming into the future was futile.

The point of what he intended to achieve today was starting to recede into the distance behind him and all he had to go on in the quasi detective archaeological search, back in time for clarification, was a crumpled page with scribblings, coffee stains and obligatory ash.

Leaving something behind for posterity was not easy and he decided to postpone the start of his novel until next week when there maybe some inspiration to draw on.