After 14 days away from my keyboard, you’d think I’d be using every waking minute now to work on my mystery novel. But alas! Everywhere I look there are flies in the ointment. Flies like mountains of laundry, an In Box full of e-bills to pay, mail that stuffed my P.O. box, and the attention of two very glad-to-see-me cats.
So I’m easing back into my routine, here. Today I re-read what I’d written in the three days previous to my hasty but necessary departure, and it’s not half-bad. I’d whacked out almost 6,000 words in three days, and the momentum I had going two weeks ago must be hanging out around here somewhere. My job is to find it!
And so it goes with so many writers I know. Multitudes of them have unfinished manuscripts “in the bottom drawers” of their desks, waiting for the time to be “right” to pick it up again. I was one of them until I spent the last two weeks sitting in a hospital room, alternately staring at mindless TV and playing Scrabble for hours on end.
While there, I thought a lot about a writer friend of mine, Randi Platt by name, and a workshop she often teaches at writing conferences. I’ve never had the pleasure of attending this particular workshop, but the title pretty much says it all: “So how long to you plan to live?”
Therein lies the question none of us have a true answer for. While we have laundry to do and mail to answer and cats clamoring for attention, our time on this earth is slipping away. So I vow now to lock the cats out of my office for a few hours each morning and get back to the business, or rather the joy, of working on my mystery novel.
I know I’ll actually do this, because I know that to finish my book I only have to write only measly little word at a time. And even I can manage to do that. Starting tomorrow!
