Like Magic

At left, tea and cookies beside me.

I'm by the fire. The foxhound is snoring at my feet. My feet have the barest edge of an ottoman as the foxhound has almost every inch occupied.

Magic.

I'm a cookie addict. I've not had a cookie for three months today, so I had one or two tonight.

Normal people don't know how long it's been since their last cookie. I know to the second. I can put down the bottle. The cookie is a tougher, well, cookie.

They'll be infrequent treats from now on, though. I want to run some recreational distance events and as a knee patient, that means lightening up. Working on it successfully, thank you.

I'm writing about the magic that happens tonight. I haven't got a clue how it happens but it does. We have problems in plot or the character actions on the page seem inconsistent with what we want to portray or we don't quite understand what it is we want to portray. Quandary. We have them.

Then, when working on something the idea of a solution appears. How? Why? I cannot say for sure.

I can say that solutions come to me while shaving 1 of 10 times. The other nine they come while working at the writing. Maybe I've skipped over the troublesome point. Maybe I've shelved a re-write because I cannot stitch the revision into shape. Whatever it is, the solution comes much more frequently when doing the actual work.

I write everyday. I have for years. What I've done in the past eighteen months which differs from the prior decade or so is write more coherently on one project at a time.

 Discipline isn't stifling. It becomes a liberating routine whose free flowing pathways established by the habit of toil allow solutions to emerge unaided.

Awful sentence that.

I will say that work is freeing - and I mean that without wanting to cause any disrespect for the horrendous suffering of so many who passed under these words on a gate.

I mean only that the habit of regular work can in itself offer solutions to problems that can emerge from time to time. I don't know how. I just know it happens.

I want to be a morning writer. I'm an evening writer by nature. Kids asleep: write. Work day over: write. Dinner served and the clean-up complete: write. It's a piece of family history for me.

I'm going to try and do the morning and evening thing for a while. I'll give it a year and see if I can rise and write as well as I can at end of day right now. I make morning notes already over the first cup of coffee after the foxhound has a good walk and a bowl of kibble. I'll see if morning notes cannot grow by a few hundred words.

I'm not really a morning lover. I'd be more excited if dawn came with cookies.

At least it comes with tea. After writing, then coffee. A familiar taste may fool my meager brain into thinking it is time to write.

I'm going to go and write now. It's a grand time to do it. Think of me in the morning. Try not to laugh.

Write something, and have a cookie. They're a kind of magic, too.