I Forgot To Write

Yesterday I was working on some promotional material for one of my books.  Then, out of the blue, I started thinking about the movie “The Devil Wears Prada.”  It’s the scene where the father is scolding the daughter for giving up being a lawyer to be a writer and now she wasn’t even doing that.  He says he receives emails from her at 2 in the morning.  She replies the he’s not being fair.  She wrote those emails at least.  Then I stopped and looked at what I was doing.  I finished the first draft of my latest book months ago and it waits its turn to be edited.  In the mean time I have been looking for people to review my books and feature them on their sites.  They need the publicity.  But my writing had been reduced to small blurbs meant to get the reader’s attention and minor guest posts.  I hadn’t written anything substantial in months and I was feeling like the character in the movie.  The reason I started in this business was to write and I had put it aside for too long.  So I set my other work aside and decided to start the outline of my next book.  There I sat with a blank screen and a blinking cursor before me, like so many other writers staring into the abyss.  At first it was intimidating.  Starting with nothing and building from there.  Then I reminded myself that I have been going over this book in my mind every day for months.  It has been planned for over 25 years.  That cursor is nothing to fear.  It is something to use.  So I did.  I began to write.  It was slow at first as I cautiously hit the keys.  Then it sped up as the story started flowing from me.  Soon I was back.  I felt like my old self.  It was a glorious feeling.  Pages rolled off and details I had forgotten came to mind as I put the outline to paper.  I only stopped when my wife came in and basically told me she was lonely.  I saved my work with pride knowing I had a toe-hold on the next book and my feeling of being a writer, restored.  It is such a wonderful feeling to write.  Creating images on paper is such a marvelous sensation.  There is nothing else quite like it.  Today I will go back to promotion work but I will return to my writing soon.  It is just too much fun to ignore for so long again.  Besides, once the edits on the new book arrive, the time for fun will be over.