We are pretty much everywhere. Look for the telltale notebook and pen on a table at the local coffee shop, or listen for a hurried pecking followed by even faster backspacing on the keys of a laptop. If you observe us for long enough, you may notice that we spend much of our time glancing around the place in search of a new idea or some way to pull our story out of the mud. Maybe a new character will walk by and energize the five hundred words we have committed to writing today. Or not.
I started writing fiction seven years ago. I had some time on my hands during the winter holidays so I decided to write a novel. I didn’t have an outline on paper, just thousands of ideas gathered from a lifetime of reading. That’s not a bad place from which to start. Quite surprisingly, about eighty thousand words flowed out of my brain and onto paper. The first draft took less than two months. I said to myself, “this is pretty easy.” That part was. Now, seven years later the work is in final form and ready for others to read. I have a lot more respect for the process these days. When people ask me if I am an author. I am more apt to say, “still working on it.”
Go Forth 