Write Fully Now

What once was a dream is now coming true. Each day falls like another domino: fragile, unsteady, insignificant hurdles, doing nothing except waiting to be swept away, leaving a clean slate for the expression of new creative passions. Soon the blank pages and empty screens will be my mind's bed - white sheets waiting to hold newly invented sweaty bodies clutching together with hope, love, lust, and passion. Or holding guns, pointed nervously at each other's foreheads. Or steering cars, painting canvas, driving nails, drinking vodka, spanking bad children and kissing good ones - or vice versa. Even, sometimes, manipulating spreadsheets, designing systems, measuring performance, reporting finances.

The day job is soon over. What has been my evenings' pleasure moves from sideline to center stage. If I can bear the lonely hours wherein I have no companions over the cubicle walls, if I can withstand the constant barking of the dog or the quiet of my home office's four white walls, if I can think clearly enough in solitude to create books and articles worthy of the masses - then this enterprise will succeed in the normal sense of the word: pay my bills, feed my belly, buy my beer.

But even if it does not bring in sufficient cash to maintain my current lifestyle, it will be a success from at least one perspective. I have always wanted to do this for a living. If I do not do it now, I probably never will, and I will lie on my deathbed with regrets. Not only for the novel never written, but for the tragedy acted upon my life's stage: the failure to follow the dream.

I have no intention of dying with such regrets. It's time to write. Now.