A Swift Kick (In Honor of Robin and Michele)

My thanks to you two, and to Mel and other readers like you. You have kept me blogging--which for me these days means writing period--when I might otherwise have let my thoughts trail off into the ether.

Note what I said about blogging being the full extent of writing for me these days. On the one hand, that's fine: my most important responsibilities are my family, followed by The Knight Agency and all that it represents. If either role requires much of my literary talent, it's the first of these: children need stories, both in the relatively easy nonfiction form ("Daddy, will you talk about when I/you/Mommy were little?") or the more challenging realm of fiction ("Daddy, will you tell us a story?")

Otherwise, nothing necessarily compels me to write fiction nowadays as I was "compelled" during the almost nine years that I spent as a professional, publishing writer. Though a lot of what I wrote about during that time was interesting to me, the driving factor was income. Then, about two and a half years ago, we reached the point at which it made far more sense to devote my energies to the two priorities mentioned above, and I quit writing for a living.

Writing for me is now no longer a job, but something much more appealing: an avocation, like it is for most people who write. I used to think about writing fiction the way I imagined a professional athlete would view the prospect of recreational sports after a day of hard training, but now I don't come to the playing field, as it were, all worn out from a job that looks very much like the same thing. And yet, for the most part since the fall of 2004, I haven't been writing. The reasons for this are complicated, but in the end I know I have to follow the advice I give everyone else: if you really want to write, then write, but if writing turns out not to be that important to you, don't sweat it, because there are other things in life far more important.

My friend Stephan in Germany (about whom I plan to blog soon) has also helped me keep my dream alive, and of course there's the number-one person who has always enabled me to discover what matters most: my wife. But y'all have also helped me sustain my vision, and for that I am greatly thankful.

The other night I sat down and wrote about a half-dozen pages of notes for future blog posts--shorthand to myself that nobody else would understand--that, if developed, would amount to a pretty good-sized book. It's true what many another professional writer has said in the past: that finding ideas isn't difficult--what's challenging is to winnow those ideas down and turn them into thoughts that others will read.

Recently our seven-year-old, on our encouragement, sat down and started writing a story, but after just a couple sentences, she looked up in frustration. "This is hard!" she complained, and Deidre and I both laughed and said, practically in unison, "Well, yeah!" Welcome to the world of words, kiddo. Fortunately, though, you--like your father--are blessed to have readers in your corner.