All writers greet each day by looking at a blank page.  These are empty pages and writers need to fill them with words.  Some days the words just jump onto the page.  On other days the page is wordless, like spouses of forty-five years eating dinner together.

Writers, if lucky, have something come to mind to put on an empty page.  Others, unlucky, have nothing come to mind.  It is called Writer’s Block.  I have been a writer of many genres over the years.  I have a room full of bins of written material. I have half of a novel in there, written roughly in complete dialogue.  I was intending to write around the dialogue to fill in the context of the novel.  I let my family read it one Christmas and my family could not see the forest because of the trees. That novel died an unnatural death.

Novels are difficult for me to write.  I have short term memory lapses and I forget the names of the characters’ names as I write.  So, the character named Sarah becomes a Susan which then becomes a Sandra. I need a thousand post it notes on a wall for longer fiction pieces.   I am positive that most novelists do not have this as a problem, or have editors who write “Who is this?” in the margins of my writing.

I write shorter pieces that can be proof read in minutes for errors.  I have enough O.C.D issues to feel pride when I do a spelling and grammar check and there are no errors.  It does not make the word filled page any good, though.  I need a different tinfoil hat for that.

I have issues with technology.  I wiped out Facebook last week and the cat walked across my keypad one night and knocked me off the internet.

Ideas come to me in the middle of the night and I scrawl them on a notepad and go back to sleep.  I cannot read my handwriting in the morning.  It looks something like “Burs da plane in the fortitude.”  What?

I write short stories, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction humor.  I have had my efforts published over time and this does not allow me to quit my day job.  I am married and he is newly retired.  I am also a mother to four adult “kids.”  If days go by and I do not write I get cross with myself.  As a magpie, I prattle with verbal overflow each day.  The cat gets most of what is on my mind.  My husband wears ear buds while he scans YouTube day and night.

I am writing this short piece to commiserate with the writers on the planet who are not yet best-selling authors.  As a young writer in college I whined to my professor that I could not come up with a plot. He told me that I had not lived long enough to develop plot lines.  I was writing character pieces, and psychological soul searching essays.

We all start the same way, with an empty page. Good luck to all of you.