To Write, or not To Write......

Its well known that every writer fears is the blank page ( or I guess now, I should say screen.). Working on drafts, re-writes, adaptation, all help in a way. Instead of having to face an empty (fill in the blank) there are specific things to be done-- there are plenty of things on the page already, waiting for you, perhaps in hiding, perhaps snickering at your pitiful attempts to bring identifiable order to your previously manifest effort at being a wordsmith. Getting in the mood to sit down, chained to your keyboard, and spending the hours necessary is a fragile thing. Easily sidetracked. Easily usurped by the mundane and the historic.

Living in the Northwest the spring evenings bring relief from the dark days of December, January, and February. During those months you can sit down at 5pm and work 14 hr and still be shrouded in the bliss of night. Sleeping in the day is barley distinguishable from sleep at night, the days only marginally less grey. (In the city the lights reflect back down off the clouds, so the nights are really just a slightly darker shade of grey than the days.) So the brightness of of your laptop fools you into wakefulness, a rectangular brightness that offers some solace. And very little vitamin D.

Like many I prefer to work at night. But now the night falls a about 930 in these climes, and the sky brightens around 4 AM. Evenings offer summer pleasures-- baseball, cocktails on the porch, golden light reflected off Queen Anne hill windows across the valley, our modern pueblo of white condos and reflective glass. Ad these pleasures to the relentless national coverage of our orange embarrassment, and, well, it is sometimes hard to sit at the computer with a open creative mind, ready to work.

A self reminder of what I must not do this summer

I will endeavor to not park, too much, this summer.