In what many of his peers are calling “an inspired choice” author Drew Chial has deleted his current manuscript.

A screenwriter watching Chial from a nearby booth said, “Drew was hunched over his keyboard hammering at the home row, an artisan nearing the end of his creation, when the light bulb must’ve gone off. I couldn’t help but admire the elegant solution he found to his problem.”

A barista behind the espresso machine said, “I could tell when Drew felt that sudden surge of inspiration, because his whole body quivered. He gripped the counter, gritted his teeth, and shouted, ‘God damnit!’ Right at the eureka moment hit.”

William Falkner once told young writers to kill their darlings, to take the conventions they lean too heavily on and heave them into a coffin. Onlookers marveled as Chial murdered his darlings with reckless abandon, selecting his entire document, hitting delete, then tearing the pages out of his memo pad one by one.

“I was going to clap, but as an I.T. professional I knew that Drew had given himself plenty of room to backpedal. He could’ve easily gone back within his document and recovered the previous version. Then Drew raised his laptop up over his head and brought it down hard on the linoleum. The logic board tore through the chassis, like a broken bone, sending the keys everywhere. Still, I held back my applause, because I knew data recovery was still a possibility. That’s when Drew went behind the counter, grabbed an urn of scolding hot coffee, and poured it onto the debris.”

“When Drew tipped that crumpled aluminum enclosure to his lips I didn’t think he’d actually drink from it. But when he guzzled that sludge of circuits and transistors down I knew he was writing on another level than I was.”

Shakespeare once wrote that, “Brevity is the soul of wit and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes.”

By Shakespeare’s logic Chial has lopped off his gangrene appendages, cauterized the stumps, and left us with a novel that must be clever as fuck.

•••

Meet Noelle, a Hollywood transplant that’s been subsisting on instant ramen and false hope. She’s on the verge of moving back into her mother’s trailer when her agent convinces her to take a meeting at the Oralia Hotel. Enchanted by the art deco atmosphere Noelle signs a contract without reading the fine print.

Now she has one month to pen a novel sequestered in a fantasy suite where a hack writer claims he had an unholy encounter. With whom you ask? Well, he has many names: Louis Cypher, Bill Z. Bub, Kel Diablo. The Devil.

Noelle is skeptical, until she’s awoken by a shadow figure with a taste for souls.

Desperate to make it Noelle stays on, shifting the focus of her story to these encounters. Her investigations take her through the forth wall and back again until she’s blurred the line between reality and what’s written. Is there a Satanic conspiracy, is it a desperate author’s insanity, or something else entirely?

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