"I don't know what I'm doing!" Ashewyck deleted the text file.  He hadn't felt this kind of frustration in years.  On the surface, the problem was that the words weren't coming out as intended; the ideas were not expressed as well as the narrative in his imagination.  In actuality, the difficulty was in being too self-aware.  This was something he hadn't felt since he last tried to draw epic pictures of wizards in high school.
	His prior successes had been rooted in blind pursuit of artful story telling.  He had learned to just let go and tell the stories in his heart.  "Edit in post-production" was written on a yellow note square stuck to his computer monitor.  When it fell off, he threw it away - by then it was ingrained.  He didn't even realize it was a mantra of his.
	If he knew, if he were aware of the meta surrounding his life, he would have reminded himself of that outlook.  He had lost his touch while working on one of his final publications, "Todd's Christmas Fun with Tofu."  He couldn't escape the thought that even children could smell how rank his writing had become.
	Sighing, he stared blankly at his desktop wallpaper.  It was a landscape ravaged by a battle waged by two spell casters, one on either side of the screen.  It was a tricky picture because whichever wizard the eye settled on first seemed at first glance to have the upper hand.  On closer inspection, there was a flaw in their attack.  Both were likely about to die, they were so intent on eliminating the other that something important went unnoticed.
	For a while, this background was just a neat, colorful, lively picture to stimulate creativity and more or less take up space.  Ashewyck eventually began to assign his own symbolism to it.  He began to view it as a violent interpretation of Yin and Yang.  He then grew to see that it was just a cautionary metaphor.  It was grave foreshadowing of the consequence he could face if he pursued dominance.  He was shown that overcoming another should not be paid for with detriment to oneself.
	Tired of thinking about it, the dalmation opened his web browser and searched "cool wizard background."  The search came back mostly unhelpful.  (Was this helpful, the engine asked.  "Fuck no," came the grumbled response alongside forceful mouse clicking.)  There were suggestions of how to draw wizards, how to dress like an ice wizard, an iceberg, an excerpt of a blog with the searched words in bold, 'should I come out as a wizard?', and eventually a gallery of fantasy art.
	Most of the images were unsuitable.  There were about thirty spell casters among the hundred or so pictures, most were sorcerors by looks of it.  Even filtering by the tag "wizard", some apparent sorcerors leaked in. Out of the eleven wizards, five were foxes, two of those were reds.  (Although he claimed he wasn't racist, Ashewyck always believed the best wizards could only be foxes.  Part of this bias was formed by the table-top games he played in his youth. Another part was the occasional dungeon hack-and-slash video games that were prominent when he was in high school. For whatever reason, he had a fixation on red fox wizards.)  He alternated between the two images.  Then, he saved both of them and promised himself that he would settle on one to be the new background.
	After glancing in the bottom right corner of the screen, Ashewyck swore. He had lost two hours on this frivolous endeavor.  Despite being half way through his work day, he had no progress to show for his efforts.  The last meeting with his editor didn't go well, so he felt like he was under more pressure than normal to come up with a story that could redeem him. 
	If he could have seen beyond his situation, he could have pieced together that redemption would be the theme that would get him out of this rut.  He had hinted at it unintentionally in some of his other works, but throughout his career of children's books, it fell by the wayside.  The groundwork was there, all he had to do was find it under his nose- but that would not happen any time soon.