If They Ask Me, I Would Write a Book…

Well, nobody asked me, but I’m writing anyway. It may become a book. It may be an illustrated story. It might even end up as a comic. Whatever form it takes, I’ve made a habit of throwing words down on the virtual page every morning with a hot cup of black coffee.

Now that my cigar box mini stacks are running smoothly and my family server is finally in place, I’ve crawled out of the digital rabbit hole and returned to the long-neglected creative side of things.
It’s nothing fancy. I get up, boot one of my vintage Mac minis into an obsolete offline OS, open TextEdit, and pick up right where I left off the day before. I write for one focused hour, then stop—hopefully leaving myself wanting more. I may jot down notes in a physical notebook during the day, but I try to keep the actual writing to that single hour. My fear is burning hot for a whole weekend and then not touching the project again for six weeks.

…or six months.

…or forgetting it entirely.

An hour may not sound like much, but I’m chipping away at it steadily. This approach gets more done than waiting for some mythical vacation where I’ll finally have “all the time in the world.”
The real trick is the distraction-free old operating system combined with the strict one-hour limit.

And of course, the coffee has to be hot, strong, and black.

So what am I writing? A horror story that has been percolating in my sketchbooks, notebooks, and the back of my mind since the mid-80s. Let’s see where the first draft takes me—maybe I’ll share a taste of it later.

I’ve also returned to the drawing board, though as usual that happens at night while watching trash television with a cat and a spouse on the couch beside me.

I’ll share some of the work soon.

Stay tuned.