The lamp casts a deep red light on his side of the room. His face looks as if it is on fire under the surface. He writes with an ink pen, the sound of the nib scratching across the paper echoes through the empty room.

There is no place for writers like him. He doesn’t write action packed whirl wind romances. He isn’t particularly good at creating mysterious stairwells or thrillers in graveyards. He writes about nothing specific. It’s a big verbose confusion of words and stern punctuation. His stories are about the emptiness of things and the lack of real feeling in the world. Nobody gets him.

For the past week, there have been three letters in the mail all rejecting his work. All the letters mention their deep regret over his rejection. He understands but they don’t need to lie. If they had any regret, they wouldn’t reject his work.

He writes furiously filling pages with his cramped inky handwriting. He looks outside the window into the dark and wonders if there is anyone out there who thinks like him and understands his thoughts. He wonders if he were to meet such a person, whether he’d like them. He isn’t a big fan of himself but he prefers his own company more than anyone else’s.

Somewhere on the fifth page, his nib cracks through the centre. It is only then that he realizes that he has been pressing it into the page a little too hard. The ink runs down the page akin to the dripping blood that the readers would love but is not something he can get himself to write about.

He isn't sure of what he can do next. He throws the pen far away and sits in a corner. The deep red light now just falls on empty spaces.