Complete Control
Chloe stared at the blank screen. It stared back. She stared some more. It was still blank. Clearly sheer willpower alone wasn’t going to cut it. At some point, actual typing of words was going to have to take place. Preferably in order and preferably in a way that was really good.
She’d got as far as typing out the title. “A Sundering Of The Ways: Book Five of The Chronicles Of The Darkening by Jerry De Luca”. She remembered when she’d fist come up with Jerry De Luca as her nom de plume. Chloe has never been overly fond of Chloe Higginbottom in the first place and, let’s face it, when she’d started out, the fantasy genre had still been dominated by male authors (and, despite some progress, largely still was). So Jerry De Luca had been born.
She’d come up with a whole backstory for him. He’d started out with a number of different jobs, most of which he’d been fired from, before finding some success as a journalist. He’d been married three times, each wife younger than the last, and he’d never met a drink he didn’t like (something which had contributed to the succession of wives). He was a rough and aggressive man, the sort of person who would introduce himself to the meanest looking guy in a bar with a hearty “Goddamn, you’re an ugly son of a bitch’ before reveling in the ensuing chaos.
Having the whole backstory fleshed out had weirdly helped Chloe with the first of the Chronicles Of The Darkening books. She’d spent years mapping out the history, political and economic climates, geography and culture of The Darkening. She had books and books and books filled with intricate notes. A whole raft of characters ready to interact with each other and play merry havoc across this vast landscape she had created for them.
Despite all of this, Chloe had struggled to get the first book off the ground. She started and started and started again and again and every time threw it all out. Something was missing. Then she’d hit upon Jerry. Something had clicked then. Having him, having this persona gave her that spark. Jerry’s writing style was reflective of his personality and, once Chloe had that, she was up and running.
The first book had been a runaway success and the second even more so. The only problem was that, as time wore on, Chloe began to resent the Jerry voice more and more. It had been great at first to shelter behind this other fictional person but Chloe found that, silly as it may sound, she was beginning to really resent his success. It shouldn't matter - she’d created him, she was Jerry de Luca, but he was beginning to niggle at her. So much so that she couldn’t bring herself to let out that inner Jerry anymore. The result being that Book Five was resolutely refusing to get written.
Chloe sighed and stretched back in her office chair. Above the creak of the chair, Chloe heard the sound of someone clearing their throat. She froze. This was possibly one of the most alarming sounds she could hear, given that she lived alone. She stayed stock still for a moment while her brain furiously tried to work out her options.
“So you gonna turn around and look at me or what?” said a gruff voice. A voice that she’d never actually heard before but instantly knew.
Heart hammering, Chloe slowly spun her chair around to face the doorway.
There stood a man in his early fifties, greying hair pulled back into a ponytail that went out of fashion in the 90s but which he clearly gave zero shits about. He was clean-shaven but still managed to look somehow dishevelled. There was a cigar clamped between his teeth which he removed with a hand that was wearing a black leather glove. It was clear that he felt it made him look cool when the opposite was in fact true. It was a face that Chloe knew very well even though it technically shouldn't exist.
“Got nothing to say?” asked Jerry De Luca.
“What...how...what...wait...no, what... ” managed Chloe, which she felt was about the best she was going to come up with under the circumstances.
“Damned if I know,” said De Luca, replacing the cigar in his mouth.
“I mean, this isn’t….this is impossible. You don’t exist.”
“And yet here I am.” De Luca moved into the room, stopping next to Chloe’s chair and looking at her expectantly. She looked back at him, confused. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
De Luca sighed. “You gonna let me get to work or what? We got deadlines, right?”
“Oh,’ said Chloe, “oh, yes, of course,” standing up and offering him the chair. She was pretty sure as he brushed past that she heard him mutter something about “chicks” under his breath (and an odd detached part of her brain said that she was the one who’d made him a sexist pig in the first place) but she stepped aside and let him sit down. He cracked his knuckles and, more revoltingly, his neck before letting his fingers fly over the keyboard.
So, thought Chloe as she watched an apparent physical manifestation of her fictional alter ego start work on her next novel, either I’m having a psychotic break or there really is an imaginary man wiring my next book for me. Either way, at least some writing;s getting done…
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OK, so that one’s more of a fragment and I feel like maybe there’s a bit more to the story of Chloe and Jerry De Luca. Maybe that will be revisited at some point….
The Prompt
Here’s what I had to work with courtesy of Jodie
Title - Complete Control
Character - Jerry De Luca
Object - A pair of gloves
Line Of Dialogue - “Goddamn, you’re an ugly son of a bitch.”
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