From my author’s notes on Waiting
…the writer’s circle of light… it’s located in the middle of winter at the back parking lot. With winter’s subzero snowflakes floating all around you—our private little hell. That is what it is like to be a writer. We live out in the hell’s frozen back parking lot, at least that’s how I view writers, we’re the forgotten and forlorn. Sure some of us get to wander in from the cold, but not many.
Cracked Planet 
Frozen speech floating in the mist of breath as the writers exhale hovers over this parking lot. They speak and speak and the cold makes their breath visible. Visible speech out in the cold, joined by snowflakes. What are snowflakes? They are frozen water. Water is accorded the life giver. So, here their words merge with life in the frozen wastes. Among the junkers and rust heaps that have been here so long the words are made visible. This is the secret. We writers have to be out in the cold away from the glitz and popular that penetrates those inside in the warm cozy world of the party.
Our party is out here where the real intersects with the ideas. It is a fact that writers have altered the space inside where it is warm. Clickety-click thunk tap tap clack click tap on and on the typing goes. So we belong out here where the popular and the buzz of the audience does not distract. Sometimes we have to take one of our own and place him on the alter–a sacrifice to the throng. As we release him from life he floats-heroic-into the warm place. He has ascended. They are the ones we chose to protect us from the warm fake atmosphere. We miss them and thank them. There is a shrine to them on a hood here, bumper there, rusting engine over there. Thank you for protecting us while we stretch into life through the cold and snowflakes where our breath merges with the frozen life of water.
It is not hell, the people inside call it that. We know better. It is life where the fingers meet the words on the frozen pages.
LikeLike