Free Personal Days by Ed Park

has a younger brother whose friend is friends with one of the people who wrote the movie about the stolen horse.
You need a foot in the door,
he explains.
    It all came together shortly
before
he got fired, during his brief exile on the sixth floor. Otto in IT wanted to try out Glottis, a fancy new voice-recognition program, so he hooked it up to Jules’s computer and asked him to say anything. This pretty much became his job for that last strange month. He would read newspaper stories aloud, bits of whatever book was at hand. Otto would study the results. Jules began to freestyle, yapping about the weather, lunch, things he overheard on the way to the office, childhood. He did different voices. Before long he was making up a story in which certain characters reappeared. The screenplay was born.
    Jules would experiment with how low he could speak and still produce legible results on the screen. At first Glottis gave him a lot of errors, thirty misrecognitions for every hundred words. Over time it adapted to his voice, learned to negotiate the peculiar Julesian cadences and frequent slurring, and the error rate went down significantly.
    Still, there was something wild about the words that would occasionally appear—surreal juxtapositions, such as when a cop character tells a perp to
Keep wool
instead of
Keep cool
or the periodic greeting
Jello!
    Sometimes when Jules wanted to open a file via Glottis, words would appear on the screen:
Open fire!
    The title,
Personal Daze,
also came about this way.
Let’s just say it’s the name of someone I met, a customer at the club,
says Jules.
I don’t want to talk about it.
    A bad egg,
says Jonah.
    Worse than that—this guy was like the bad
chicken!
    How can
Personal Daze
be someone’s name? Jules won’t elaborate, as if he still fears retribution.
    Jules dictated reams of material during work hours. Every night he’d boil down his ramblings to half a page. By the time he was fired he’d compiled nearly 150 pages of fast-moving, wisecracking, bittersweet dialogue.
    Now he estimates he only has twenty-five pages left to go before he can stop composing and begin revising. But somehow it’s harder to write now that he doesn’t work in the office.
    You need something to push against,
he says. He compares the creative process to an oyster requiring sand for a pearl.
Also, I need an ending.
    He attributes his current writer’s block to the fact that he no longer has the voice-recognition system. Glottis costs a bundle, as does the brand of microphone headset with just the right sensitivity. He misses the surreptitious muttering, the magical appearance of words on the glowing monitor like a parade of ants materializing out of a pool of milk. More than anything else, he longs for the faulty wording, the slips between thought and expression. The misrecognitions had been his inspiration.
    Jules is cagey at first, but then lets Jonah read certain scenes. Mostly it’s a ghost story set in a haunted gentleman’s club on Eleventh Avenue. The main character, Jude, appears to be modeled on Jules, down to the precision-cut sideburns. The rest is a little hard to follow but seems to take place in our office, except that everybody likes the boss and plays basketball with him.
    I must have been reading a dream sequence,
Jonah tells us afterward.
    Playing the frog
    Jonah keeps his door shut lately. Is he working on his own screenplay? Listening to opera nonstop?
    Sometimes we forget about him for days at a stretch, until we hear the Mexican distress frog’s plaintive call:
Takata takata takata, kat-kat ka-tak.
    A mouse in the hand
    Three of us meet with the Sprout. He hums tunelessly as he toggles between files on his computer desktop, smiling unhappily as he eyes various charts. Like some of us, he has a second, older computer on his desk, which he also glances at now and again.
It’s a period of transition,
he likes to say: The new system hasn’t been successfully phased in yet and no one