One of my favorite singers is Iris Demint, and one of my favorite songs by her starts like this:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Sweet is the melody, so hard to come by&lt;br /&gt;So hard to make every note blend just right&lt;br /&gt;You lay down the hours without a trace&lt;br /&gt;&#039;Til a tune for the dancing is there in its place.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The moment I heard those words written by a song writer, I knew they reflected every writer&#039;s life, mine included.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;There are plenty of people out there who want to be writers. &nbsp;I don&#039;t blame them. &nbsp;Writing has been good to me. &nbsp;But, and there are always buts, it is WORK.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&#039;m sitting here in the family room with my laptop in my lap. &nbsp;(That&#039;s how I avoid carpal tunnel. &nbsp;I work with my keyboard on my lap with my wrists supported by my lap!) &nbsp;&nbsp;On the wall beside me are framed copies of the covers of all my books, except the latest one. &nbsp;More than forty. &nbsp;Not closing in on Louis L&#039;Amour&#039;s 90 books, but getting there. &nbsp;People who come here and see the books, might recall where they were when they read it or one aspect of the story. &nbsp;I hear what they say as they point at one cover or another. &nbsp;&quot;Isn&#039;t that the one with the burning fishing boat?&quot; &nbsp;&quot;Where&#039;s the one with Anne Corley?&quot; &nbsp;&quot;That&#039;s the one where Fat Crack dies.&quot; &nbsp;Or &quot;That&#039;s the one I was reading when we were in Hawaii.&quot; &nbsp;Or, &quot;I was reading that one when my dad was in the hospital.&quot;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What those covers represent to me, however, is thirty years of work, one book after another. &nbsp;Each one contains approximately one hundred thousand printed words. &nbsp;However, that total doesn&#039;t take into consideration all the words that were put in and then taken out or maybe put BACK in later on in the story. &nbsp;We&#039;re talking well over four million words here, all of them typed by my fingers. &nbsp;And those are just the books on the wall. &nbsp;Add in five year&#039;s worth of blog updates and thousands of answered e-mails and you will understand why the keyboards on my computers are always the first to go. &nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;One of my kids came home from college years ago and asked to use my computer to write a resume. &nbsp;I was in favor of that, so I handed it over. &nbsp;He looked at it and frowned. &nbsp;&quot;But their aren&#039;t any letters,&quot; he said. &nbsp;That was true. &nbsp;I had worn off all the letters. &nbsp;Unfortunately for him, he wasn&#039;t a touch typist. &nbsp;(God Bless Mr. Biba, my high school typing teacher wherever he is!)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That was on one of my former Toshibas. &nbsp;I&#039;m almost two years into this MacBook Air--two years and almost four books. &nbsp;(I&#039;m currently at 63.34% of next summer&#039;s Joanna Brady book. &nbsp;Sorry. &nbsp;That book STILL doesn&#039;t have a name.) &nbsp;The keyboard is getting tired. &nbsp;Some of the paint has chipped off the C-key, so it looks more like a backward 9. &nbsp;I&#039;m sure some of the others are going to start losing pieces of paint soon. &nbsp;That doesn&#039;t really matter, however, because I don&#039;t ever LOOK at the keys.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In other words, you may think a writer&#039;s life is all about being out in public with my makeup on and my hair combed signing books. &nbsp;And that&#039;s certainly and important part of it. &nbsp;But in large measure, writing is typing and counting the words. &nbsp;Knowing how far I am in that 100,000 word process helps me know how many more words I have left to use and how many scenes I need to create in order to wrap up the book. &nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But something has to happen BEFORE I can type anything. &nbsp;I have to THINK! &nbsp;I have to have quiet time while I mull over the characters--who they are; what they&#039;ll do; WHY they&#039;ll do what they do.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Quiet is sometimes hard to come by around here. &nbsp;All summer long we&#039;ve had workers on site doing a much-needed landscaping job. &nbsp;There have been people coming and going almost every day during the week, and on weekends we have kids and grandkids in and out. &nbsp;As a consequence, my best thinking time is when I&#039;m in bed and supposedly sleeping. &nbsp;People who see the book covers hanging on the wall don&#039;t think about my tossing and turning in bed, trying to make a book come to order. &nbsp;When I look at the book cover, I see the parts of them that came to me in the middle of the night, striking me as funny or touching--the tough-talking parrot in Improbable Cause; the adoption scene in Kiss of the Bees; the trip down Schnebly Hill Road in Edge of Evil.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;People ask me sometimes if I outline. &nbsp;I think of it more as in-lining than outlining. &nbsp;I put myself inside the story and see where we all go.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In this case, I have 34,000 words left to use, so I need to get busy. &nbsp;The deadline on this books is actively ticking because the LAST book took longer than it should have. &nbsp;Fortunately, while I was typing this, I just figured out how to resolve one of the problems in this book. &nbsp;That was thinking that happened WHILE I was typing. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But what I can tell you is this. &nbsp;Like Iris Demint, I am laying down my hours without a trace, and Joanna Brady # 15 will be there as expected next summer.&lt;br /&gt;