It’s time

Otto woke me up around 6:00 this morning by putting his huge wet head across my forehead. When he gets like this, it’s usually best to get up and feed him,

After dog chores, and making a bit of coffee, I headed for the writing cabin.

I radioed ahead and Lisa was ready for me. She already had her pirate gear on. I breezed past her and made for my office.

After a quick check of social media, and baseball standings, I stared up into a pair of malignant black eyes.

Doubt opened his wings and sailed off his perch, landing on my desk. He made one of those guttural throaty noises only a raven can make.

“I get it,” I said. “It’s time to get on with it.” I opened up the manuscript for Voyage of the Lanternfish.

Doubt croaked at me as I read the first page. I found a couple of wordy passages and fixed them.

These weren’t direct enough, and the repairs helped me get into a deeper point of view.

I kept going.

Doubt interrupted me a few places, and I gave most passages a second thought. I didn’t fix many.

“Not this time, buddy. I have a lot of things to doubt in my life, but this manuscript isn’t one of them. I like this story, and you aren’t going to cloud it up for me this time.”

I kept moving. By the time the day ended, I’d moved through 187 pages. This likely doesn’t mean much, because all writers write differently. My style is a lot of white space on the page. I’ll likely have more pages than some other author.

It took most of the day, but it was a good day. Doubt tried his best to put me off his game, but it didn’t work.

I have tomorrow off too, and intend to keep going. This is a good story, and I want to have it ready as soon as I recover a bit of promotion money.