"Shit". Another paper ball went flying off the bed into the trashcan. He'd been at it for hours now, trying to get his thoughts out and get back to sleep. But nothing sounded right. What good was it to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas if they were always pretentious knockoffs of better plots and better writing?
Chuck scrubbed his face and sighed. How the hell did he end up here, writing obsessively at 3 A.M for the fourth night in a row? He never even wanted to be a writer, not really. Sure, it always sounded exciting, but he had been more than happy with his dead-end job. But no. he had to turn his nightmares into cult novels and drag this all out.
It had been fine at first. Seeing his dreams fleshed out into short stories made him feel accomplished. He could finish writing and forget about the dream. There was a larger plot, and he could see the ties here are there, but it was all very "Case of the Week". Clean. Simple. Neatly wrapped up at the end.
But then it just kept growing, and he couldn't stop dreaming, thinking, writing about it. He'd just zone out and feel it, arcs fleshing themselves out and linking together, the story twisting in on itself as if he had no control.
And now here he was. Writing about his characters reading about themselves, meeting him, finding out everything he wrote was real. Jesus. Metafiction? Really? Who the hell did he think he was now, Vonnegut? He was Chuck Shurley. Carver Edlund. A thirty-something nobody and purveyor of crappy pulp novels that only seemed to attract overly intense fans.
Chuck shook his head. Maybe it was a good thing that Flying Wiccan was pulling his funding. No matter how much Sera encouraged him, he didn't even know how he felt about the story anymore. It all felt so... much. So much for Sam and Dean to take on, over and over. And God only knows how his fans would react to the whole angels and apocalypse arc. (Okay, maybe he did know. He was a drunk recluse of an author with no life. He may have anonymously started a flame war or two over the whole thing, but that wasn't the point.)
But it didn't really matter what he really wanted. Didn't matter that he wanted Dean to talk about Hell, or Sam to stop sneaking around and drinking demon blood (he cut it from the final draft, but it was still there), or for them to just be honest with each other about everything. There were times he hated every word he wrote. But changing the story never worked. He just ended up with a migraine and burning pain behind his eyes until he fixed it. It was like he had to write it this way. Sometimes it made him feel out of control, like it wasn't really his story.
It wasn't his story. That thought always made him really nauseous because it felt so true.
He sighed again; he was doing that a lot lately. His whole life seemed like one big sigh at this point. Shaking it off, Chuck grabbed a beer off the nightstand and dumped his trashcan on the bedspread. He took a long swig and started uncrumbling the scraps of paper. Maybe somewhere in here was the combination of words that would dull the pounding and let him sleep for a while.