The End?

In 2011 and 2012, two new products of this pen – a novel entitled Every Third Thought and an essay collection entitled Final Fridays – are scheduled for publication. Both were completed in 2009, my eightieth year of life and fifty-third as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition I didn’t think of them as my last books, only as the latest. But in the time since, although I’ve still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I’ve done for decades, and faithfully re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I’ve written . . . nothing.

That room is divided into three distinct areas: COMPOSITION (one side of a large worktable, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and non-fiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), PRODUCTION (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and BUSINESS (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the ritual:

Step One is to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in their fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as a long-time empty-nester in a quiet house, I continue to feel the need for them.