“Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

That’s write. I mean right. When I was a kid, from about eight, I was into music. Classical mostly. I played Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach on the piano. When I was eighteen, I taught piano lessons to make extra money. And about that time, I started getting into poetry. At first, it was a hard nut to crack, a long hard slog. But before I left college, I learned that poetry could be as simple and elegant and enormously powerful as music. With economy of statement and a free heart, a poet can soar. So I wanted to be a poet.

Can’t make any money writing poetry, can we? So it’s always been a night job, competing with the TV and a thousand other distractions. But I know it takes time and work and commitment.

I’ve written a lot of poems, some stories, the first crappy draft of a novel. Thousands of business letters, memos, legal documents, technical manuals, and essays. And more recently, over 800 blog posts. But you don’t know me; you might find me in Barnes & Noble’s computer for one small book of poems. Despite what Marc Antony implies, I’m not an ambitious man.

My point is this: With all that writing I’ve done, why is it so damably hard to cough up one simple little two page resume? Does anybody else find that the most difficult thing to write on the planet? Wouldn’t you rather sit down with a legal pad and a sharp #2 pencil and hammer out your own eulogy?

…

Later tonight, I’ll be re-posting the draft first chapter of the novel. I know some of you have been getting anxious about that.