unlight pours through the windowpane of Charlie's breakfast nook. It saturates a thick stack of plain white paper, leaving it luminescent within its bright hazes there atop the table. The placement for having the first-and-most-important meal of the day is, in fact, rarely used for this purpose. But instead for housing laptops, printers, ink-cartridges, notebooks, manila envelopes, and just about anything else when would use to methodically put one's imagination to glorious use; for partaking in the unforgiving pursuit of indication. Charlie even has a small pile of publishing self-help books to aid in his tireless efforts. This space is utilized to bring some of Charlie's fantasies to life. Where he can obsessively unpack just a fraction of the imprisoned scenarios that whirl around up in his over-active, complex mind and attach them together into stories. 
Outside his cluttered little home, it is a gorgeous Tampa morning. Various birds fly up and down, chasing and swooping as they play. Charlie stands, arms crossed, with a cup of steaming coffee in his left hand. The young man is of average height and weight with mid-length hair, arranged in a side-parted hair cut and his eyes are dark, not only their particular shade of brown, but the accompanying bags underneath. He wears beige khakis and a white, long-sleeved undershirt. He squints as he looks through the bright uncovered window of the nook. He winces through the sunshine, watching the swallows fly sporadically from the blue sky above and into the green shelter of a nearby red cedar tree.  He ponders his main character's destiny and how he will align with it. Charlie has been working for some time on what to write and what not to write. In fact, he has been pondering all spring. Stockpiling ideas and angles. He's written seven books of fiction, four full-length novels,  one novella, and two novelettes.  He doesn't count his short stories within his total sum, but he should. 

Now, he's gone back to his first story, his very first.  It consists of fifty-thousand words, roughly, and after being read by trusted friends and knocked around the publishing industry -- where it has been pushed into the slush-pile, lost, dropped, kicked, stepped on, picked up, wiped off, flipped through, read, and returned--for 4 years, he has finally revisited it.  No matter how long he watches the birds or fills his cup or even how many times light shines through his window, Charlie is perplexed. Is it the wrong timing? Bad luck?  It had been a few years since he had read through it. Perhaps his growth as a writer should be applied. He isn't certain, but he questions himself about the only issue there could possibly be. Can a story really be that flawed structurally? He can think of no other reason why it is overlooked time and again and intense to fix it. 

In the years that followed his first piece, he noticed something, something significant, when he wrote. He couldn't see it in the first book...somewhere within his second one...the structure began to build itself...naturally. The proper grammar simply came. Run-on sentences dispelled and so did his overly descriptive style, without sacrificing depth. Charlie was growing all the time, and he knew it. 

​

In his backyard, he notices a red piece of material or...something. It's about twenty-five yards away in front of a row of well-manicured bushes. The ones at the back of his lot, below a line of trees.