It's been years. But I took a full five days off.
This week in Chicago for my wife's birthday, I agreed that I would leave all writing assignments and deadlines behind. (My one and only writing-related concession being that I stowed away a daily supply of love poems that I doled out to Becky like prescription pills. These were real doozies that ought to be published under the title: Romance Poetry for Old Ladies Who Love to Shop.)
Those five days in the Windy City have now placed me in a pen, however (note the pun!). Taking five days off from meeting deadlines has totally messed up my mathematically-calculated annual writing output (MCAWO) and created a new scenario where, in order to meet demand, I'm going to have to rise even earlier, and write faster-smarter-and-crisper in the months ahead.
In fact, in the days leading up to this break, I fielded so many calls from editors that my plate is beyond brimming and I may have to write on two keyboards simultaneously in order to fulfill the demand.
But hey, I'm not complaining. In fact, I returned from Chicago with a wallet full of napkin notations, hotel stationery outlines, and toilet paper quotations that I now must translate into actual essays, chapters and reviews. Let the fun begin.
And I did get to introduce myself once in Chicago to a gentleman who, like me, was standing in the foyer of some fancy-pants women's clothier waiting on his wife to pick out a one-size-fits-all girdle. He wanted to know, "So . . . what do you do, pal?"
"I'm a writer," I told him. (Reactions, believe me, vary from New York to Chicago to small town Indiana.)
This guy didn't flinch. "Interesting work," he said dryly with no follow-up.
Indeed.
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