The Key

Touch a key, a computer key.
What are you thinking as your hand hovers above the keyboard just before your start, fiction, real, feel it, say it. Which letter do you touch first? Why?

I write about me; essays actually. About my family, because they let me, but not about my friends, I’d piss them off. I write about, what I know about, which isn’t much but sometimes everything. My hands hesitate, my mind lingers on a thought and then I touch the keys because I have to. It’s a curse really, a compulsion, a drive to communicate, a need to focus on something that is within me. Because I write, I am.

I’m famous you know.

My fame is like a glass of water compared to the ocean. No writers are ocean-famous. The closest, if we were counting money, and I am not, would be billion dollar Rowling. Shakespeare and Dickens, Atlantic famous maybe, Tolstoy, Black Sea, Michener, South Pacific across and back again; Twain, Mississippi legendary, fitting I guess. King, Koontz. Patterson, Cussler and Grisham, they can argue over which Great Lake belongs to each of them.

I counted well over half a hundred of my bylines. There was a time I considered myself a writing failure because I do not have one title page to my credit. So it is that I am a glass of liquid, sometimes salty sometimes sweet, not a high ball but a double old fashioned, beyond the shot glass and half full. I am proud.

So, did I know when I sat down and placed my hands upon the keys I would write about writers, oceans and containers made from the sand which rims them?

Your hand hovers, your mind stirs, what will you write today?