It's now or never

Sooooooo, I've been using my sister's laptop for about a year and a half.  Well, using it when she's at work, anyway.  Writing in the mornings while it's still quiet in the house has been when I get the most (and usually the best) work done.  But I can hear the kitchen TV while I'm typing, even sometimes with headphones and the Rolling Stones in my ears.

So I took the plunge and bought my own laptop.  I'm not online yet with it so I'll be using my sister's setup for that still, temporarily.

I work part-time and that laptop took a chunk out of the bank account, I'll tell you.  Thought about a netbook, decided it wasn't right.  I had a gradual realization of "If not now, when?"

I want to be published.  I can taste it, I can see my WIP as a physical book as I write, I can even picture myself going through revisions based on an editor's suggestions.  When I think about not writing anymore, my insides freeze up.  My head explodes.  Writing is what I do; I can't set it aside.  For over a decade, one of my sisters and I shared an alien universe and wrote - in longhand - dozens of notebooks about the same group of characters.  We hardly stopped to eat, sleep, feed the cats, notice if it was day or night, summer or winter.  We defined being consumed.

Life intervened and I didn't write much for a number of years.  Once I got back to it and hit my stride, I felt a sense of loss over the time I can't get back that was not spent writing.  I also felt that I had found myself again.  You writers out there, you get it.  Anybody who once put down the thing that keeps them breathing and came back to it, you get it. 

My Muse is fully awake.  She stalks my subconscious like Zeus, ready to fling lightning bolts.  I offer myself, without reservation, to be used however she chooses.  It's more than a renewed commitment.  It's a deep and relentless obligation.

To those who know the pain and radiance of being a writer: rock on!