All your kidnapper wants is fifty-thousand words by the end of the month. It should be easy; you've been planning this book in your mind for years and have always wanted to sit down and write it...but just haven't. Unfortunately, your captor, the Lurker, has several ideas about how to "motivate" you: taking a red pen to your first draft in front of you, bribing you with a cat, and the most horrid torture imaginable...reading your old fanfic out loud while you beg him to stop. "The Lurker" is a meta-humor novella about the struggles of writing a first draft. One would not call it a thinly-veiled metaphor because there is no veil. Though often comedy "The Lurker" is a meditation on the nature of the artistic process and the hostile voice urging us to create.