Jo

Born to an average family, Jo Hawley-Norris was educated in a sleepy university town until their late teens - whereupon they moved out to the big city for university. One English degree and lots of rejected job offers later, they pursued a long and arduous PhD, enabling them to finally land a job as an assistant English professor in their hometown. In the present day, Jo is in their forties, living alone in a small cottage not far from the town centre. As it stands, many unfinished manuscripts detailing fantastical stories pile up around their desk, interspersed with well-loved novels: spines cracked as they reference them again and again, pages dog-eared and tabbed to be reread with the same excitement as the first time.

They collect dust.

On their desk: opened post. A sterling silver knife lies half buried within a carefully torn envelope, the top of the headed paper is visible where a snappy logo catches the reader’s eye. “We regret to inform you that while your application has caught our interest, we are unable to offer you a job at th-”, disappearing beneath the bright white sheath.

Around the cluttered desk, offers for careers seminars and job change workshops lie with their cheap glossy paper reflecting the yellowed light, tinted by the aged windows.

But while the light illuminates these paper-bound taunts, it also gleams off the sparkling dust emanating from the books that have been pushed to the side; it collects on the records that lay across the coffee table; it swirls past the paintings of their grandmother, across the barely touched boardgames on the shelves. It rises and floats towards the vintage, Victorian bed where the stacks of books from the desk spill over into a pile, their fluttering pages licking at the edge of the ancient, flowery duvet.

Specks of stagnance, dirty and unwanted, twinkle above Jo like forgotten stars as the sun goes down. Drifting through the frigid autumn air they surround their owner; remnants of a lost passion.

Though manuscripts, papers and stories litter their desk - it all makes way for their Great Work; their Masterpiece; their Chef D'oeuvre. Or at least it would, if they had got around to starting it yet. Plagued by Writer's Block, they have yet to begin this seminal point of their writing career, despite promising again and again that it would happen.

Instead, they waste their life on their blog; mundanity over all.