The little guy you see above (if you don’t see him, read my postscript below), clicking away at his old-fashioned typewriter, represents the life of a professional writer as I once imagined it would unfold. There would be an early period of appreticeship, of course, during which I would learn the "tricks of the trade." This would take some time, but if I applied myself, I thought, I could get a lot of the necessary learning under my belt before graduating from college, so that fairly soon after copping a diploma I would find myself tapping happily away at my Smith Corona keyboard as one idea after another tumbled out of my head onto the paper in front of me, each one an income-generator.

I didn’t imagine that a day short of my 62nd birthday I would still find a blank piece of paper (or a blank computer screen) to be such a formidable challenger to my self-confidence. At this point in the process, it’s not about tap-tap-tapping on a keyboard. It’s about doing the dishes, getting the day’s mail, mowing the lawn, and mainly pacing around my house and/or neighborhood — all in a state of such severe distraction that if I found a gold doubloon in my coffee cup I might not realize that it wasn’t just another spoonful of Splenda.

Eddie has learned not to try and converse with me when I’m in this state, because even if I look in his eyes and smile and nod I will not be absorbing a single word that he says. I will be somewhere far away inside of my head, trying to coax a muse who has in the course of decades been sometimes a flirt and sometimes a torturer into being merciful today.

P.S. Do you see a drawing at the beginning of this blog post? Is it moving? Or do you just see one of those little icons that mean that some file that’s supposed to be present on a web page isn’t downloading the way it’s supposed to?

These days the majority of computers in the world arrive already equipped with Flash Player, a tool that lets them view animation created with a program called Flash. If yours isn’t one of them, you can easily get it as a free download from Macromedia (which now lives at the home of its new corporate owner Adobe).