The other days

Friday, January 17, 2025

Some days the words just show up. You are practically vibrating as you sit down at the keyboard, coffee cup in hand. As your hands fly across the keyboard, your coffee grows cold, forgotten, as the words crawl across the page. Often when this happens, you have been carrying these words around with you in your head, playing with them as you put them first this way, and then another. Like pieces in a tile puzzle, you decide how they should go, how you make the picture printed on the tiles make sense.

By the time the words are on the page, they are old friends that have played in dozens of ways, having begun as thoughts you wrestled with, played with, gotten to know. Writing in those cases is merely transcribing. When I have days like that, writing is sheer joy.

And then, there are the other days.