The Email That Brought Me (and my writing) To Life Again

OK, so I'm sitting at work the other day (I’m a programmer by profession), indifferently tracing through a subroutine to find an obscure error in a broken program that I didn't write but I was told to fix, and suddenly -- have you ever heard of micro-sleep? It's when you fall asleep for anywhere from a fraction of a second up to thirty seconds. According to Wikipedia, "...It often occurs as a result of sleep deprivation, or mental fatigue, sleep apnea, hypoxia, narcolepsy, or hypersomnia. Microsleeps can occur at any time, typically without significant warning."

Well, I'm not sure exactly how long it lasted, but it did happen without warning, and based on the morning’s work, I’m sure it had something to do with mental fatigue! I woke up with a jerk, and looked around furtively; hoping nobody noticed my little micro-sojourn into oblivion. Good, all clear. ‘I need a break,’ I mumbled to myself. After a quick stretch, and a long gulp of my lukewarm coffee, I stood up and took a short stroll around the office; just enough the clear my head.

When I got back to my desk, I sat there, staring at the program code, thinking, ‘I REALLY don’t want to do this right now.’ So I turned to my laptop (I’m one of the lucky geeks who gets a desktop with two monitors AND a laptop,) and opened up Firefox to check my email. Twenty-eight new emails – and that in the last two hours! Thankfully, I could delete half of them. Between the junk mail, forwarded chains, and email subscriptions that I never have time to read, it didn’t take long to get to the REAL stuff. Of the half-dozen or so left, one subject line stood out. It said “Short attention Span Theatre…THE VOTES ARE IN!!”

All right, it’s time for some background. A good friend of mine owns a black box theatre here in town. A couple years ago, he decided to host an evening of ten-minute plays that would spotlight local playwrights. I wrote one, and was hooked! I loved writing plays!

So, anyway, I read the email, which explained the submission guidelines for the playwrights. The theme is ‘a hallway with three doors.’ What!? What the heck am I going to write that involves a hallway with three doors!? Since then, I’ve had a couple ideas, started working on dialogue and characters, but I’m not sure, yet. I may start over. Hmmm…

Well, I really should get back to it. I need to see if I can even end this thing gracefully in ten minutes! I’ll let you know how it’s going.