"Writer's . . . write." What wonderful advice. When you forget all about who you are and what you are supposed to be doing, you can always take comfort in that. Isn't it a strange thing, to live always so much in your own head, and not come out except in reading and in writing? Its like there are all these strange nooks and crannies of self hidden away in a place no one else can see. You forget to come up for air, and you start to suffocate; before you know it, you've drowned, and no one realizes it.

Sometimes, we don't even realize it ourselves.

Sometimes I feel like a technician with words. My words or the words of others hardly matters. If it is modern fiction, hot off the presses, or something I've scrounged up that was wet ink only a few hundred years ago makes no difference to me. And turning them over and over and over. I imagine a tech crew working, crawling through ducts, tool belt slung low on their hips as they work on the guts of a great, life- giving machine. Something like an A/C operator, my father's profession, with the steel-toed boots and the thermometer in the pocket, crawling through dictionaries, pour over ancient texts studying writing manuals like blueprints. The diagnostic machine is entirely within built out of intuition and trained with as many years experience as you choose to pour into it.

And I have pour all of myself into this work. I am a little afraid that I might not see any positive results out of it. Writers are not generally a very happy bunch. We tend to have a lot of problems. Not just the day to day problems of misplacing the lucky dress you need to wear on your next date, and the car breaking down on the side of the road, and the two hour argument you had last night and can't get out of your head the next morning. We have those, too; everyone has those, and unless you can work magic with them, they aren't very interesting, because everyone has them, and ours are always worse.

Have you ever met anyone who said that they're problems aren't nearly as bad as yours? Someone who really meant it? I heard someone once say to a woman dying of cancer, "You think you have problems? Look at what that crackhead beautician did to my hair!" This was in response to hearing that the woman was given six months to live. Oh, by the way, this was a daughter speaking to her mother, too. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?

That's part of the problem of a writer. Our souls are a lot closer to the surface than most folks' seem to be. We see problems of others, and can feel their pain. It's too easy for us to empathize, even when we've never actually experienced that particular form of torture ourselves. It's not exaggerating; its the truth.

I once wrote a poem, and made the mistake of showing it to a particular friend, who let a number of strangers read it. One of those strangers was a teacher I was aquatinted with, but would never have trusted with such an intimate part of myself. She came up to me with tears pouring down her face.

"How did you know? That was exactly like I felt like when it happened to me. Did someone in your family go through a similar loss?"

I had to tell her no, that I had just written it. I had a hard time getting away from her, since she wanted to talk over every detail of her pain, and share it with me, and try to figure out how I could have written such a piece. See, the poem was about a mother who lost her child to an early, unexpected death, SIDS.

I was in ninth grade, had never had children, and had never known anyone who had lost a child, either to that ailment or any other. No one close to me had ever died, at that point in my life. I'd never even been to a funeral before. I just knew how it would feel, imagined a scenario, and had written about it. The fact that I had done so in such a way as to dramatically appeal to this woman's feelings was strange and alien to me, but not entirely surprising. I couldn't tell her that I just knew how those kinds of things felt, so I really didn't tell her anything at all. I tried to be more careful about who I let read my work after that.

Today was the first really nice day that we've had around here, after many cool, rainy days. Several girls turned up for school in skirts and dresses, their hair down and blowing romantically in the wind. People were standing around talking and laughing about how so many had decided to dress feminine today, as if I conference had been held to determine today as the day to wear your spring dresses. I guess that is how they bring the romance of spring into their lives.

I sat on my front porch for about an hour today, notebook in hand and writing steadily. Sorry to say, I did not come up with very much. It would be disheartening except that everything I've ever read in all the writing books I've come across say that the act of writing itself is what is important, valuing the quantity rather than the quality.

For myself, I've decided not to worry about it. Some days are made for just sitting in the sun and thinking. Writer's write: anything beyond that is just a bonus.