All this writing is getting in the way of my writing. I have been revising the living daylights (pun intended, sort of) out of my “Lemonade Chronicles” book manuscript for the past few weeks. That process is pretty much all-consuming, it turns out. And it does little to soothe the savage beast when it comes to actually churning out new content and releasing the pressure valve on what bubbles and boils beneath.

People like me experience great difficulty in keeping their ideas to themselves.  I know — we know — that our ideas are, objectively speaking, highly unlikely to hold more merit than those of anyone else. Moreover, we are downright mystified by normal people’s ability to contain their own ideas, never uttering a peep, not poised to burst at the seams, completely uninterested in unleashing their thoughts on the world the moment those thoughts take an even vaguely coherent form.  Shoot, I rarely even have the patience for the coherence stage; let ‘er rip! The start of this blog post is a fantastic case in point….

The more I write, the more I must come to grips with the fact that I have little else other than words. For example, I have a need, an apparently compulsive need, to scratch them nightly into my too-small journal until my hand muscles cramp.  Actually, I push beyond the cramps, which may explain the illegible handwriting.  On the plus side, no need for a secure padlock on one’s Daily Journal, if one’s Daily Journal bears chicken scratch incapable of being deciphered or decoded by anyone. I even get pissed at myself, muttering curse words surrounding by my first and/or last name, when I revisit some now thoroughly unclear thought crampedly-scrawled only last week. What the hell is the point of all this writing, if even the writer can’t read it?

And yet, I write. 

Except when I don’t. 

I realize this book “revising” process is an absolutely necessary stone along the path to getting one’s book published. So I’m hopscotching on the mossy thing with the best of them. River-dancing on top, even. Big smile forced across my face.  Look at me! I’m writing a book!

Except that it feels like I’m not writing. 

So I’ve resolved to pull my attention from the two overflowing shoeboxes holding book drafts 1A and 1B and, when inspired, crank out a little something new here and there. Again, I remind you that this drivel is drivel.  No better than your drivel.  But I can’t function, it seems, without driveling on a regular basis. Like the mushy jack-o-lantern on my neighbor’s railed front porch, I gotta be free!

And so, with that, I have some bad news: We’ve been saying it all wrong. To our mates, to our children, to our co-workers, and to our neighbors. Some of you have even involved your postal carriers in this, I know.  It’s “Daylight Saving,” not “Daylight Savings.” My wife dropped this bomb on me Sunday morning, crushing my fragile position as our household’s Commander of Words. So you can thank my wife for setting me — and thus all of you — on the righteous path of straightness and narrowness.  Sitting here now, I’m reasonably certain that neither “straightness” nor “narrowness” are proper words.  But I am so out of actual writing shape, I don’t care.  I was up at 3am working on my godforsaken book.  So I haven’t the energy nor the patience, nor any of the other necessary ingredients, to tidy this up.  And to add insult to injury, not only have I now been officially dethroned as Resident Wordsmith by my missus, I have also come to the painful realization that I have actually achieved no daylight “savings” of any kind. Ever. Nothing. 

But at least I feel a little bit better now regarding the Bubbling and Boiling Beneath Department. 

Thanks for reading.