So here's the thing. You tell people you are devoting yourself to your writing career. And next thing you know, you can't write a thing. (Shhh. Don't tell my editor.)
You create many other things instead. Ranting Facebook posts about the NFL. Questionable tweets about real estate transactions you're not involved with. You bake pumpkin bread even though it's not actually in season yet and Martha Stewart would have your head. You bake cakes and have friends over for celebrations long overdue.
Meanwhile, your book sits in your computer like an aging cheese.
It's getting to be one of the stinky ones. Let's call it Clarkburger.
When you sit at your desk, finally, with that giant stack of printed editorial comments, which is resting on the legal pad that contains pages and pages of things-that-seemed-brilliant-at-the-time...you can't bring yourself to open the stinky cheese package. You brace yourself. You sit back a little in your chair and you stop inhaling so fervently. Aging cheese smells bad to you. You may click on your desktop to peek inside. You may look at pages 1-25. Those seem safe. But they're not, oh, no. They are dangerous. They have been rewritten to the point where they barely even exist anymore. They are more like Swiss cheese. Many holes.
Then you realize you have "Track Changes" on and that's ridiculous at this point in the manuscript, so you adjust your settings.
You need to adjust ALL your settings. There's this one button, F51, that appears only on writers' computers. It stands for Area 51. It's where weird things happen and fears get set aside and scenes disappear only to be replaced by new scenes and nobody knows what's going on except maybe your characters. So it's time to hit F51 and listen to them.
Besides, you are allergic to the soft cheeses.
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