"writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audience would know.

A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about."
~Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

I had to write this down it. I've read it a half a dozen or so times, but each time I do it seems to impact my life with more force than the time before. Last night I settled into bed, picked up his book once again and waited to become inspired. Ah isn't that the key, I waited to become inspired, but in truth a writer cannot wait to be inspired, he must set pen to paper and produce inspiration. It is amazing what I can produce when I inspire myself without any help. But those poisons he speaks about influtrate my system and I catch a virus that prohibits me from writing healthy prose. God-damn it! I'm not weak I can get through the worst of this world has to give me and continue on. So last night I put off the pretentious thoughts and dove right into a story. I saw a woman and I began to write about her day and tonight I will continue to do so until her story is told.

My laptop is on my bed, I now sleep with it. It isn't as cuddly as a woman, but she lies silent waiting for me to touch her and if I don't spend the time with her I'm supposed to she will forget me as I will forget her and then I will lose my love. I cannot afford to do that any longer. The poisons must be expelled and I must create what my heart yearns to do come hell or high water. I will fight the poisons from 8-5, but my subconscious will be adrift waiting for the time I can begin my real work, the work between the hedges of a paragraph where my inspiration comes from putting my fingers against the keyboard. What will I produce? I'm not sure, it may even stink like shit, but my soul will conspire to to forge something new in my own words which I cannot even seem to express to myself. As one writer once said, "To write the story I cannot fathom how to write."