Reconnected

In what felt like stolen time (it was stolen time), I found the novel I'd been writing again—only for one half a day, but still, the time was something. Too many weeks had gone by without some kind of communion with my characters and their story—some research, some finagling, some thrown-to-the-page metaphor that I'd toss in despair the very next day, but that's the size and shape of the writing work, and I was missing the size and shape of the writing work.

So I returned to the novel.

Why does it always surprise me—the calm inside the eye of writing? How could I have forgotten how necessary it is, in my own strange world, to be there with the stories in their ill-formed, half-inebriated state? My whole physiology turns around books (I'm calmer, my feet don't ache, my heart is not doing that strange pounding thing), and those are just the facts, and I can't help them.

And also, of course, I'm not alone. And so, as this old year ends and a new one dawns, let me introduce you to yet another literary web wonder—something that is called the Red Room. It's not just a place where writers virtually live, and where readers can find them, but it's a place of good where, as the founders write, they "give back to the community we aim to nurture with our commitment to the Causes We Support." Red Room launches officially in March. I'm very honored to be part of it.