The reality is, sometimes things get in the way of writing. Family in from Pennsylvania, my regular family and full-time job obligations and a convergence of two sites that I work on for friends and friends of friends needing a huge amount of attention all hit at the same time. All this went on for nearly two weeks. Could I write during that? Honestly no. I needed to sleep in order to focus on the next day. To be technically correct, I did write some -- I even edited three semi-long pieces while all this was going on -- but we're talking a trickle. Just enough to say I wrote, really.

But when I woke up yesterday [Saturday, May 29] there was no visiting family. I was caught up on work. I had knocked out the non-work sites. There was no critiquing waiting in the wings. I was even well-rested. To add to the day's perfection, my wife had plans to take my younger son and his best friend bowling until mid-to-late afternoon.

I split before everyone rose and was out the door just after seven. Nothing but time and writing ahead of me. I could feel the pressure of writing long waiting to be done behind the dam as I drove.

A writer never really stops writing. During all the madness of the previous two weeks, I still ate and showered and drove and walked. To a writer, that's basically planning time. Perfect for contemplation of details and jotting notes. So when I finally sat down with my Local Coffee press pot, the next six hours -- 6 HOURS -- were writing bliss. It was as if the rubber band had released.

The piece I'm working on requires a huge amount of attention to word choice and fluidity to pull off a very thick and unique dialect, so the hours didn't directly translate into a high word count, but writers know that word count and page count are not the be all and end all of a successful day. Sometimes simply solving problems is enough. Sometimes getting right the order of detail revelation is enough. Sometimes smoothing the language or doing good research is enough. I pulled off a little of all of these plus put down a few good new pages.

I'm sitting in bed writing this and only wishing today offered a fraction of the time I enjoyed yesterday. Times like these, I know I'm a writer, no matter the stage of my career. This feeling and this yearning for more. This looking forward is what the art and life is all about for me.

Disclaimer: I've heard that some authors do this, so I'm not pretending I'm the original inventor of using a unique marker in any written works in progress.

Rarely will you sit at the computer and finish a piece in one sitting unless it's a flash piece or a short article or blog entry. For everything else, one needs a way of finding where you left off at the end of the previous writing session. Sometimes there are even multiple stopping points.

For instance, you write along and realizes new turn would be cool. But it requires you add a certain something higher up in the manuscript. You want to go back and add the detail. No problem. That is, there's no problem if you've stopped at the end of the manuscript. In that case, fine. Add the detail and skip to the end of the document. No trick needed.

But when is that the case? That you write a piece from beginning to end. If you're like me -- ever like me -- where you write as much as you can and later have the need to start writing from the middle of the manuscript. You insert a chapter or scene. You're right in the middle of everything. Now, when you have to add detail elsewhere or if you need to leave the document entirely for quick research, you need to find your place quickly when you return.

Remember: As in reading where anything that takes you out of the story should be avoided, anything that takes you out of the writing should also be avoided. Sidetracks like research and tweaking the details are necessary, but they need to progress with as much speed and fluidity as possible to keep in the zone.

So how do you get back to where you started? My answer?

swh which stand for Start Writing Here

I have not discovered those three letters next to each other in any writing. There may be a company or program out there with those letters, but how often will that really come up?

So all I do is type swh and I'm off to my edit. If I forget to go back to that marker, no harm done. If I have a number of them, I can search for them and close all the holes I left. And since I've come back to an swh and have forgotten exactly what I was working toward at that point, I've recently begun added a quick stream of consciousness note that is sure to jog my memory when I do eventually find it again.

swh:Wady concentrate faint shadows appear slowly mesmerizing OR swh:research bicycle-chain tool

If I do that, I make sure to add a return at the end of the line so I don't risk confusing the note with the text that may exist close by.

Try this or find your own marker. swh is surely not copyrighted. Just make sure you don't forget what tag you've chosen or you risk missing it in the manuscript.

The first chapter of Forever By His Side, my latest novelette-to-novel-length work, was critiqued Tuesday evening (May 11, 2010). The reviews were largely positive. And since first chapters pose the greatest challenge for most writers, I was heartened.

Forever By His Side follows Wady, a 14-year-old girl living far from normal society in a place that is (or may as well be) Appalachia. The boy Wady loves doesn't return her feelings. She finds out from her mother a secret, an ability the women in her family has passed down for more than a century. The gift turns out to be a curse and the passing of the ability a cruel trick played on Wady's great grandmother Ruthie Mayo when she was 14, also in a love that was not returned.

With this work, I'm biting off quite a bit. Wady and all those she interacts with have a deep-woods manner of speaking. The beginning paragraphs give you a good idea of the voice. (Disclaimer: These paragraphs are modified slightly; I had originally gone out on a flimsy limb, hackin' the "g"s off all the ing endings. I had read not to do so a dozen times, but something in me said I could pull it off. I couldn't ;)

    I was becoming more like Ma every day, filling out my dresses similar to her and giving myself recently to conversing more than horseplay. And it was during some late Summer sitting, me in Pa’s rocker and Ma in her own, I struck up an old topic between us.

    Ma? How’d you and Pa come to be together?” If I done asked her oncet, I done asked twenty times, never yet hearing a plain-spoke answer from her.

As expected, the challenge was to keep up the dialect at a consistent level. My upbringing largely in Tennessee helped a great deal as did my exposure to my rural family in Ohio. Those factors and a natural gravitation to country folk I've met helped a great deal. 

Word choice was crucial. Paraphrasing one member of my critique group: "Reading this sort of thing aloud is vital for catching when the voice falls away." I couldn't agree more. I read aloud and still managed a couple misses in the 11 pages. Still, no worries. Nothing that can't be corrected.

Next, the nature of the magic needed to be better defined. Until fresh eyes read through a piece like this story, you can't get a good idea of how certain elements are going to be received. Being too close to the story, knowing what everything was supposed to mean and how everything was intended to work, I was blind to alternate ways processes could be understood.

There were other critiques, but they were smaller fixes not worth going into. The bottom line is, neither of these problems could have been caught by me. So, if you're not already in one, join a critique group. If you're disinclined to join in a group, find a critique partner. I can't stress enough how important it is to have others -- not family or non-writing friends -- look over your work for you.

What I'm talking about is doing what one needs to do to make time to write.

If you didn't already know, I'm a web designer with ICG Link, Inc. in Brentwood, TN. I've been with them since '99. I worked in the office for about 4 years before my wife, Nadine, started moving around the country following better positions, first within, then without the company she worked for. Since then, I've been tele-commuting.  It's a great gig. If there's any drawback to the job, it's that it's not a magic position that allows me to do virtually nothing and still collect a fat-ass paycheck. Wouldn't that be great.

Kidding.

The real drawback of working from home is that, knowing I have all the time in the world to get my hours in, it's tempting to take a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day or pick up the guitar. This often makes my days long when they could, if I disciplined myself, go pretty quickly, especially considering I don't have a morning or afternoon commute. What I'm accomplishing is not a freer day or week, but less writing time. 

Self-defeating.

And that leads me to a new phase of experimentation. I'm trying out working four 10-hour days. No naps. No distractions. Just plug away. I've always been able to stack a lot of hours over the weekend, but this gives me a whole weekday day in which to exclusively write. I'm not sure yet if Friday or Wednesday will work out better. Friday strikes me as the better day since it would feel more like a reward for a week of hard work, but Wednesday would be nice too since it would break up the long days.

I've always written some in the evenings through the week, but I find that unless I can dedicate a good three hours, I'm not really writing my best. Typically, I get about an hour each night if I'm not distracted by rare TV or family obligations. So even on the best of days I feel like I'm wasting the time whether I'm writing or not.

I'm on my last long day this week, so tomorrow (Friday) will be my first test all-writing day. I'll let you know how it goes.