My first blog started at a Lady Gaga concert in 2009 and deteriorated from there. Eventually I started this blog so I could write about writing, which is the one thing I know a lot about and probably more interesting to people than a blog about picking up after your dog.

In 2013, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which I could safely do from the basement of my home when I wasn’t at work, at the park, at the supermarket, trying to maintain a relationship with my wife, etc. My goal for that six-week ultra-marathon was to write 50,000 words. As we neared the end, I opined that this goal might have been “a wee bit optimistic” while trying and failing to kick the nearest dog.

“I do wish I wrote fiction faster, but I don’t,” I admitted in a post dated 23 July 2013. “Marketing writing—that I can do fast. Advertising, editorials, web copy—I’m a speed merchant. These blog posts? Warp factor 6! But when I have to invent characters and situations and see how they play out, I move one. step. at. a. time. Sort of like the way the first primitive Mariners played baseball.”

But I did find that, as with anything you practice, the more you write, the more you will write, and the more you will think about what you’re writing. “There’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel,” John Updike said.

All day long that summer, and sometimes in the dawn before the alarm exploded, something in the back of my brain was working. I could quote Pink Floyd here (“There’s someone in my head/but it’s not me”), but every practicing writer reports what I reported then: “Objects and actions bubble to the surface, things I can use on a page I’ve already written or one I have yet to write, like a bird finding the right-shaped stick for its nest.”

Yet another reason why employment is bad for you

My years-long training in writing marketing and communications copy made me fast, but it also made me impatient. Know what we think about in Marcom? Tomorrow. Know what we don’t think about in Marcom? Yesterday. I wrote the first draft of a novel. Now you’re saying I have to go back to it? What about the next thing! The newest! The greatest! What about all these leftovers and scraps and ideas I’ve been working on since December?

And so with some difficulty I have returned to the manuscript, which feels as if it spent the winter in the same orbit as Pluto, and to the feedback I have received from three insightful people. The re-entry process is not immediately appealing, but I know what it is, and it’s simple:

Show up.

Return to your pages every day, preferably at the same time every day. Your fingers will unfreeze. The words will arrive. The tautness and the bubbling will return (sorry, I’ve tried on both metaphors and I can’t decide which one to take home). You’ll remember that revision is the fun part. And whatever objects and actions pop up in my brain in the dawn hours, you can be sure I’ll welcome them, right before I grab the alarm clock and throw it across the room.