Well, my 10 days are up! And I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge - even if my days of journaling make it sound like I didn't. I'm posting the final, Day 10 Finished Piece first, followed by the nine days of journaling leading up to it. So - um, here it all is then, I guess...

DEUS EX MICROMANAGER (Finished Piece.)

Onus threw down his pen and pressed his hands over his eyes. It was all going wrong; everything was chaos. And every time he tried to fix it, he just seemed to make things worse.

You didn’t get to be a WorldScripter for countless millennia if you weren’t bloody good at it, and Onus prided himself on being one of the few true veterans left, scribing the destinies of the planets he managed. At the start of his career he’d only been given the most basic ones to practice with – small, single-biome worlds inhabited by only the most simple life-forms, but as his experience grew, the Higher-Ups gave him ever more complex projects. That had been fine while he was still young and full of fire, but just lately…

A plume of white flame burst upward from the surface of the planet closest to him, jolting him back to reality. He snatched up his pen and fumbled for the last entry he’d made in the book… hadn’t he expressly added in the checksums to their conscience codes about using weapons of mass destruction on each other? Well, clearly that hadn’t been enough to stop them, little bloody parasites. If he’d known about their latent greed and tribalism right from the start, he’d never have given them opposable thumbs and let them start cooking their prey, but hindsight was always the most useless tool in the box when it came to fixing things. Not that anything else he’d tried fixed anything conjured up by this little lot. They were relentless. It was almost as if they wanted to genocide each other into extinction.

“Everything okay, Onus?”

Onus darted forward to swat away the smoke plume still curling from the planet’s surface. “Yes, everything’s fine, thank you.”

He tried to make his face look nonchalant as he turned in the direction of the irritatingly familiar greeting. Delegato was from the new generation of Worldscripters, several millennia younger than him, and she’d been ‘just popping in to see him’ more regularly of late. He knew why. She was waiting. Waiting for the Old Hand to slip up and make a few mistakes. And, once she’d caught enough of them, she’d gently suggest that, maybe, it was time for him to retire. New brooms for old, making a clean sweep; that was her game. “Do you need something?”

“I was going to ask you that, actually.” Delegato smiled at him, her gaze a little too focused and loaded with professional sincerity than he was comfortable with. “I’ve been looking at your workload just recently, and it seems like you’ve got a lot of complex projects on the go. Too many for just one Scriptor to manage, really—”

“For one old Scriptor, you mean?”

“No—”

“You’re trying to think of a nice way to put me out to pasture, aren’t you? Tell me this is a young Scriptor’s game, and I should just step aside and let some fresh blood have a go? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but some projects need experienced veterans like me to keep a handle on them.” Onus jerked his thumb at the planet beside him as another fountain of white fire plumed up from the surface. “These nasty little creatures don’t respond to logic. Or natural pest-control events. Or miracles they can chalk up to some random magical being – well, not for long, anyway, and never in the way you intended. Trust me, I’ve tried everything.”

“Well, maybe you need a break then. A little time away from the problem, to clear your head, and come back refreshed.” Delegato tilted her head like a concerned parent. “When was the last time you stepped outside this room, Onus? How long has it been since you had some time off?”

“Time off? What do you think would happen to this planet if I took time off? It’d be a smouldering pile of ash by the time I got back!” Onus folded his arms across his chest. “You young’uns think you can solve every problem with your fancy new ideas and updated ways of doing things. And yes, I’ll grant you, some things you can. But not all of them. You need people like me around, for when your newfangled approaches don’t work, and the old school strategies are the only things left to fall back on—”

“Onus, no-one is trying to replace you or your knowledge. You’re still needed and valued. But you can’t take care of everything all the time.” Delegato sighed. “You’re exhausted. Everyone else can see it except you. You think you’re hiding it, but it’s there in your eyes, every time another fireball explodes on your pet planet.”

The defiance drained out of him. He suddenly became aware of the ache in his back, the heaviness in his limbs, and the emptiness in his heart. “It feels like a war I just don’t know how to win.”

“So, take some time for yourself. Go outside, breathe some fresh air, do something just for you. Let me watch your planet for you for a while.”

“I can’t, it’s too much of a risk. They’re volatile, those creatures – you don’t know—”

“I know what they’ve become, and that they’ll probably never evolve themselves out of it. They’ve been trying to fireball each other into oblivion for millennia already, with you watching their every move. Seriously, what difference is one day away from them going to make?”

Her eyes were kind now. Of all the young blood that were stepping into the profession lately, she was already proving to be one of the smartest. She could probably handle one day for him. “But – what am I going to do instead?”

“Whatever you want. There must be something you haven’t had time for.”

“There is one thing –”

“Well, go and do that then.”

She reached into his pot of pens and pulled out a quill, examining the tip briefly before sliding up beside his desk and glancing pointedly at the wooden stool he was sitting on. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a small bloom of orange flame spreading across a corner of the rainforest landmass on the other side of the planet. He sighed. Another problem to add into the mix. But… well, that was level one stuff. She could probably fix that without his help.

He got up. “Thank you. I won’t go far, and I’ll be back first thing tomorrow. In the meantime, if you need me for anything—”

“I’ll be fine, Onus. Just go. Do what you need to do.”

***

It was still there from yesterday, poor little thing. No-one else had noticed the tiny, furry little body, lying on its side, with its eyes scrunched shut, its little tail pointing stiff and straight behind and its little mouth lolling open in a last squeak of despair. Onus crouched down beside it. Him. Yes, this little mouse was a Him, he was sure. And he’d had plans and dreams and friends and loved ones, before some terrible and brutal calamity had brought his life to an abrupt end.

“Hello there, little fella,” he said softly.

The mouse didn’t answer, of course. He was long past being able to do that. Onus heard the tuts of irritated passers-by as they had to swerve around him on the street. It didn’t matter to them that a small and lonely death had occurred right under their very feet; the old man was in their way, and the little corpse he was sheltering nothing more than a mangled little speed bump on their way to Somewhere Important.

Onus paid them no mind. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, wooden box. It was the perfect size.

“Don’t you worry, little fella,” he said, “everyone else might have ignored you, but you haven’t been completely forgotten. I’m here. And I’m going to do right by you now.”

*****************************************************************************

DAY ONE.

Today I noticed how my desire to get on with writing my novel-in-progress does not seem to match my drive and discipline to actually do the thing. Why is that? I love my story; I have it all planned out, from beginning to end, so it’s not like I don’t know where I’m going with it. I’m not bored with writing it – in fact, I want to keep writing it, with every fibre of my lackadaisical being. Is it really the fault of World Politics?

The last time I stalled with novel was when A Certain President was pretending to run A Certain Country. Now I’ve stalled again, just when all the talk for the next election in That Certain Country is boiling back up to volcanic again, and A Certain Candidate will seemingly not shut the heck up, not even for a single day. The world in my story is in a dystopian state after a corporation took control of the state by force and is now being run as a dictatorship under the boot of that organization. Is it possible that, every time I sit down to write this novel, I feel, in some way, I’m writing a potentially nightmare future into existence?

Or maybe the problem is on a more micro level. I know I’ve been agonizing over each sentence I write, the moment I’ve written it. “No, that’s not precisely how I meant to say that…. Oh, that just doesn’t look right… this is drifting away from the real point of this thing… uhhhh, why can’t I make these people talk on the page like they talk in my head?”

WORDS SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD. Why can’t I write a single sentence of my novel without immediately wanting to tear it apart?

DAY TWO.

Today I noticed I have a floater in my right eye, and it’s right smack in the middle of my field of vision.

It’s probably only teeny-tiny in real life – a microscopic bug of a thing, sailing around in the ocean of my eyeball fluid. But it’s annoying the living heck out of me. Of course, it moves when I try to focus on it, but also when I’m looking down, or from left to right – which, until now, I never realized I did as often as I evidently do. It sweeps across my vision like a little fuzzy windscreen wiper, and I hate it and want to kill it with fire.

I wonder how long it’s going to be there, waving at me from deep inside my eyeball? Maybe only for a day or two, because I’m tired and a little stressed. And once I get a couple of nights of decent sleep, and a day where I can relax enough to stop obsessing about burning enough calories to justify the amount of food I put into my face-hole each day, it’ll just float off to some unobtrusive corner and stop bothering me. Maybe it’ll take weeks, or months. Or maybe it’s there forever now – another square closer on the boardgame of life towards that big one in the corner marked Death, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect £200. “You’re getting old now, girl, you should expect these things, and more of them, the older you get.” I’m not old in my head. I’m only thirty in my head, with loads of stuff still to do, roads left to go stomping down! But my body is older than Head Me and begs to differ with every day that passes.

I tried shaking my head violently from side to side, and then up and down, but the floater is still there, and now I’ve given myself a headache.

DAY THREE.

Today I noticed how much of the online world is all about the money, baby. You sign up for a thing, they want your deets so they can sell them to other people who will then virtually harass you into signing up for their thing. Not many people online give their time and their help for free anymore, that’s for sure.

Some do. I’ve watched a lot of content on YouTube from creators who share their knowledge in interesting and helpful ways, and all they ask for is your attention. They earn that attention too, with great content. And then… there are the other ones…

I’ve just spent some time watching a YouTube tutorial on the GIMP software program, because I wanted to learn how to get rid of the background from a photo to leave just the person. The tutor started out by showing what he called “the basic way to do it,” and I followed along, doing what he said to do with a photo of my own. I had to keep stopping and rewinding to do a bit again, because it hadn’t worked the way I wanted it to, and I thought it was because I’d got it wrong somehow. After numerous aborted attempts, I just thought “Screw this, I’ll just keep watching to the end and maybe it’ll all make sense then.” It was only once I did that I finally got to the part where he said “Okay, that’s the basic way to do it – but that way sucks because it never works properly, so here’s a much better way to do it…”

DUDE! You couldn’t have led with that? Why did you just rob me of minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, making me do stuff that was ultimately pointless? Of course, I already know the answer is that YouTube videos have to be a certain, minimum length before that sweet, sweet ad revenue kicks in. All that useless information up front was just foreplay no-one wanted or asked for, to pad out a run time that, predictably, barely lasted three minutes and ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

I bet he was even smoking a cigarette afterwards.

DAY FOUR.

Today I noticed that lots of other people who have done and are doing this very same course as me are posting the results of their hard work online, for everyone else to see. So, I went and had a look at some of them, didn’t I? Because of course I did.

And I noticed how beautiful some of their prose was, where they spun metaphors like molten sugar strings about happy things; lovely things they’d seen heard, smelled, tasted, touched. They were obviously skipping contentedly through the world observing the little things outside of themselves, embracing nature, humanity, the spirituality all around them in their everyday lives… being nice, positive people…

And what’s Muggins here been doing since she started doing this journal? Whinge whinge, I’ve lost my writing mojo because I think I’m predicting the future. Whinge whinge, I’m old and knackered now. Whinge whinge, I can’t believe a capitalist-driven society would only want me for my money, when did that become a thing…?

Oh my god, I’m actually a terrible person, and this journal is now my written confession…

Well, okay, maybe ‘terrible’ is over-egging the pudding a bit. I’m Eeyore in human form is what I am. Marvin the Robot in a flesh-suit. This is why I don’t belong at parties, or any event where visibly and proactively enjoying yourself is mandatory. My subconscious has always known this, so it makes me dread them because it knows that if it ever made me love them, even accidentally, I would wreck the party vibe worse than a rousing chorus of ‘disco inferno’ on a kazoo at a funeral. No, wait, that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to convey.. let’s have another go… than a bailiff at a housewarming party?

Uhhh… see, this is why I don’t do metaphors!

DAY FIVE.

Today I noticed how I never seem to stop.

I’m always doing, doing, doing – thinking about doing, assessing what I’ve just done and wondering if I did it properly and maybe I should do it all over again… I go to bed at night thinking about all the things I need to do tomorrow, and if I have a moment where I don’t have anything left to do, I think “I should be doing something right now…”

I’m living my life at a hundred miles an hour, always moving on to the next thing to do. Even now, as I’m sitting writing this, I’m trying to beat back all the thoughts about other things I still need to do – today, tomorrow, next week, six months from now. I’m sprinting through life as if there’s a finish line I need to get to, but there isn’t, or it just keeps moving the closer I seem to get to it. It’s always just over the horizon.

And I bet, if I ever do get there, there’ll be no-one cheering for me, holding one of those tinfoil capes to wrap me in and handing me a Mars Bar for my efforts. (Heck, I might just run a bit faster if I thought there was a Mars Bar in it for me at the end!) It’ll just be me, standing there all sweaty and tired, thinking “Well, if I’d known it was going to be this anticlimactic, I’d have stopped off in a few more coffee shops and played on a few more beaches along the way!”

This is exactly the kind of stuff you say to yourself when you hit your fifties, isn’t it? You don’t say this stuff in your twenties. You’re all “Aaaaarrghhhh life, gotta do it all, places to be, goals to achieve, gimme ALL the life, throw it at my face and let me HAVE IT ALL, YAAASSS!!” I mean, looking back at the start of this entry, I’m still saying all of that. Part of me is saying all of that. And the other part is the old lady, saying “Whoa, slow down, smell the flowers, watch the clouds, cherish every moment of the dwindling days you have left, you decrepit old Gen X-er you!”

Sometimes I wish we got an option, once we hit fifty, to have a do-over of our lives, but with all the knowledge we have now. What would we change, what would we keep the same? I think I wouldn’t change very much of my life. But the few things I would change, I would change radically and without inhibitions.

DAY SIX.

Today I noticed that not being able to fit my three gym sessions a week into this week, because I’m doing extra shifts at work, irks and worries me far more than it reasonably should.

I don’t know what I imagine is going to happen. Is it that one week – or possibly two, since I’m working extra shifts next week as well – is going to undo everything, to the point of me blancmange-ing into some huge, gelatinous Jabba the Hut? Pretty sure that’s not how it works! Nor am I likely to be a gasping, wheezing heap on the floor the first time I resume my gym regime after a (possibly) two-week break. Why does my brain always reach for the most dramatic scenarios? Why is my worst-case always on a level with a bad anime cartoon?

I was chunky as a child, and boy, did my parents keep me well-informed of that fact. My mum actually started before I got chunky, pretty much as soon as I hit puberty – she warned me that she was fat by the time she was thirteen, so I’d ‘better watch out.’ Sadly, the warnings didn’t work, because, even though I tried really hard not to get chunky, it happened anyway. I failed. And not just failed, but failed after being warned not to fail, which, as we all know, is even worse. I think that’s probably where my paranoia about my weight first began.

Damn, I didn’t want to talk about this. When I started this course, I decided in my head that any Lifetime TV Dramatic Backstory Stuff was NOT ALLOWED in these pages. Nope, we’re not doing this, not going there, this is NOT a chuffin’ personal therapy party for one. I need to Woman Up and get it together, right now!

And would you look at that – my ten minutes is up now! Saved by the bell. Wasn’t that lucky – for all of us?

DAY SEVEN.

Today I noticed a dead mouse on the pavement on my way to work, outside the retirement apartment block down the road from where I live. And it made me sad.

I don’t know why I mourned this little mouse. I didn’t know him personally. (I’m saying it’s a him, but I couldn’t tell for sure – I certainly didn’t look that close. He could’ve been a she instead, but my brain’s defaulted to him for ease I think, and it’s stuck in my head now so I’m going with that.)

I don’t know how he died, but I could tell from the mangled state he was in that it was brutal. Hopefully quick though. I won’t go into details, because, for all I know, you’re out there eating some sort of lovely snack while you’re reading this, and then I’ve just ruined it for you with a graphic description of a murdered mouse. I will tell you he had dark grey fur though, and little pink feet and tail, and unusually large ears, even for a mouse.

I felt sorry for him there, all on his own, largely ignored by the world. I wondered if he was a parent, with little mouse-babies wondering where their daddy was (or mummy, since I don’t know for sure.) Did he have a mum and dad? Did he have little mouse-friends, who were all hanging out somewhere thinking “He’s been gone for ages now – d’you think he’s okay? Should we go and look for him?”

What happens to all the dead mice once they’ve died? What to they think happens to them after they’ve died? Do they care, and miss their departed friends and family when they’re gone? Are they atheists, or do they believe in a god? It’s most likely a Mouse God if they do, because it wouldn’t make any sense for it to be a human one. So… if all animals, birds and non-human creatures are way more likely to think of their ‘god’ – if they have one – as being one of them… that kind of throws a shadow of doubt over the man-made religions with a human god, doesn’t it? Because it would make no logical sense for any of them to swear allegiance to a human god.

Did I just get deep? Or maybe just dumb?

DAY EIGHT.

Today I noticed that I have far too much to do!

I went to the asthma clinic, for that usual thing they do where they ask you a bunch of questions they’ve already asked you a million times before, and you always give the same answers (because ‘Never smoked’ is always going to stay the same, since I’m not that much of an idiot that I think “Well yeah, I have asthma and bronchiectasis, so after fifty-odd years of abstaining I think I’ll start smoking now, just for the laughs.”) And then you get given a massive to-do list of things you need to sort out, so they can tick off a load of boxes that mean they don’t have to do anything. I need to chase up the hospital about a lung function test that they told me they were going to arrange for me. I need to book myself a pneumonia vaccination, because apparently one exists, and the hospital would definitely want me to have that even though they’ve never mentioned it at any point to me. And I need to chase up the pharmacy company delivering my medication because the acapella device ordered for me by my doctor (who I’m sitting in front of right now) hasn’t arrived.

And I’m sitting here listening to her rattling all these things off and I’m thinking “Hang on, why is all this my responsibility? I know you’re freakishly busy and all that, but since you’re the ones who put all of this stuff in motion in the first place (I certainly didn’t demand any of this stuff,) what makes you think they’re going to listen to me, Mrs. Random from Somewhere, one of millions of anonymous patients they deal with every day, over you, the medical professionals and probably colleagues who originally made these requests? I’ve got enough to do already, thanks! I’ve also got to try and sort out the mess that is the botched application process for my teenage son’s student account, I’m doing double shifts at work this week and next week – I don’t have time to do medical admin as well.

I probably will still do it all though, because that’s my life. If I don’t do it, nobody does it.

Wow, I’ve had a proper old whinge today, haven’t I? What a lovely person I am to be around. If I was a lonely cat lady, instead of a woman with a husband and son, when I died it would be alone, with only the cats surrounding me. And when the Emergency Services broke in to find my corpse, those cats would be eating my face, until someone offered them plates of Whiskas instead.

DAY NINE.

Today I noticed how, even when I’m ill, I still priorities the things I ‘have’ to do over the things I want to do.

I’ve been feeling absolutely dreadful for the last two or three days – some sort of cold or flu, I think. Not COVID, luckily – I took a test, because I knew I couldn’t show up at work if the test was positive. I might have that ‘never miss a day of work’ mantra, but I wouldn’t stick to it at the expense of other peoples’ health. However, I think this may go at least some way to explaining my angry rant in yesterday’s journal entry.

And through this whole time of feeling lousy, these have been my top priorities: don’t push myself too hard, in case I make myself worse and then become too ill to do my work shifts, cook everyone’s meals as normal and just generally keep the house running. But, at the same time, don’t chillax too much, in case I end up not being able to get back up off the couch/bed/floor to carry on doing All The Stuff. Take my cold meds, so I can keep going? Yep – check! Cook only healthy meals, so I can eat healthy and get better quicker? Yep – check again! Go to bed earlier at night, rather than stay up and watch tv or play games on the PC? Yep – check times three!

But do something enjoyable, like the aforementioned tv watching, or game playing, or knitting my rainbow jumper, or creating some artwork, or going down to the gym? Ooooh, no, gotta save that energy for Getting Better instead! The only reason I’m still writing this journal is because it’s fallen into the Duty category; I made a commitment to complete this course, and I’m gonna see it through, dammit!

Let’s make this very clear – this is NOT a humble-brag. I don’t see myself as being in any way virtuous, stoic or admirable for having this attitude. In fact, if anything, I’m shaking my head at myself right now and saying “You pathetic little loser, have you learned NOTHING from your life? No-one else cares that you’re doing this. You don’t get any Extra XP from the Universe for it, and your social status is not going to soar.”

The other parts of me are very critical of me sometimes. I wouldn’t treat anyone else like that – not ever. But I guess when it’s me, it doesn’t count. Or something.

Wendy Christopher

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