Today, I want to write.  Really write.  I want to print out my novel-in-progress and attack it with a yellow highlighter and red pen.  I want to figure out the damn timeline and people’s ages once and for all.  I want to wallow in words.   

I want to rewrite what’s been written to make it punchy and vibrant.  I want my readers to crave the next page if only to consume more quirkiness.   

In short, I want my brain to soar like my main character Laynie’s does when she is deep into transcription: 

Deep into it, fingers flying, right and left brains soaring, Latinate language free-falling in pixels to magnetic medium, Laynie. . .  

Even when I’m telling and not showing, I want to get away with it through choice of language and strength of character. 

Today, I want to write. 

I’d fire up the coffee pot – all 12 cups – and dive deep into it.  I have three projects I’m working on.  If I get stumped in one, I’ll just move to the other.  I would do so on the king-sized bed.  Comfy enough to sit cross-legged with the laptop on the breakfast tray and the pages all around me.  In the bedroom, I can either kennel the dogs or shut the door to keep them out.   

I don’t want dog slobber messing up the ink on my pristine pages. 

I’ll put the carafe of coffee on the nightstand.  Pouring the first cup, I’ll settle in and start with Chapter 1 again. 

Chapter 1 has been edited so many times now that it’s as perfect as I can get it, still yet, I tweak words…and word order.  I add a detail that will be important later.  I worry it too much and force myself to move to Chapter 2 which needs a lot of work now that this chapter is the second one and not the fifth one like it was last week.   

Chapter 2 will require much red ink and highlighting.  It is here that the timeline problem is essential to fix.  Laynie has already gone from a Gulf War veteran to an Iraq War veteran (and enlisted to officer).  She’s still a widow and still an orphan and still in search of her runaway grandmother. 

I want to take time to watch some Scrivener videos and read the help manual.  Yes, I fired it up and it seems like just what a need for a novel where I want to move chapters around and have multiple main characters.  Scrivener is slicker than I originally thought.  But very complicated and not user friendly.  It is not intuitive in the least.  It took me two hours to figure out how to print out 5 of my chapters in Word format.  Two hours. 

I want to write.  What I really want is time to write.  Great big blocks of writing time.  An hour here and an hour there is just not cutting it any longer.  I want to wallow.  I want left and right brains to soar in tandem and fingers to fly. 

Today, I want to write.