How's it feel? The pleasure ought to be illegal

Not that I don't have anything else to do--including giving The Vanishing Magic of Snow an edit and polish before reformatting...this after launching Red Champagne--but I'd still been dogging it on beginning the next book.

Oh, the itch kept growing...and ideas kept coming...but I might as well have just sat in a bar talking the book to death with drunks.

Today, though, the itch refused to go unscratched another day. Out came the new notebook with a growl--'You lazy friggin' bastard!'--and I began the grunt work that may go on for months: taking notes, asking questions, outlining possibilities...

Reb MacRath, back in the saddle again.

The thing is to trust in the process: one question breeds another...I have been through the same cycle so many times. And yet the great challenge remains ever new: simply to trust in the process. We defeat ourselves by thinking that we need to reinvent the wheel each time.

If a wheel has worked for decades, get out of its way and, by God, let it roll.