Joe

Writing has been a little better yesterday and today. But I have to admit I've been sidetracking my own self with coffee.

Yes, I said coffee.

I started thinking about the damn stuff--I read a dumb mystery set in a coffeehouse--and now I've been reading up on it, and it's my new current obsession. I tell you, it's hard to focus on little things like writing when your brain is saturated with roasting, plantations, extraction ... sigh.

See, for me, writing is kind of like burping. It's not something that I'm crazy about or obsessed with, but I can't get by without doing it. I know you're supposed to speak highly of the craft and they say you'll never become a true writer unless it's the most important thing in your whole life. But I don't feel that way about writing. For me, it's not the driving passion of my existence. But then again, things that have been my driving passion have just flickered under the blowing gale of my life, faded out, gone away. Writing, which I'm not passionate about, never leaves me. And I can't stop doing it. No matter what I do, stories jump out of my brain and spin out in long streams of words. It's just what I do.

I've accepted it. I suppose it doesn't sound like much to the Ernest Hemingway/Virginia Woolf school of writing. But it's me! Right now I'm crazy about coffee. But I'm living writing.