A New Chapter

As the pounding rain on my skylights competes with the familiar throb of blood pressure on my inner ears, it all conspires to focus me on a new life chapter.

Like many others, my subconscious usually knows just how to guide me. It told me to blurt out a date request to a cute college girl for a Mets game in 1987. (We were married four years later.) It convinced me to leave newspapers in 1992 because even then the handwriting was on the wall in Courier Bold. And, it told me it was okay to leave "a good job in the City" and embark on a downsized life in Upstate NY to facilitate the most important of all work: raising children.

Now, the internal core of my CPU is asking just what I've been doing the last 20 years to push my life passion. "Where's the professional writing? Where's your promise to me that we'll work like craftsmen churning out the equivalent of Chippendale piecrust tables for a discerning buyer?" It nags me in the most unusual settings. Daydreams in a cafeteria where my frugality stands out with my bag lunch to bedtime visits by dead family members playing like a silent home movie reel. Grandparents, happy to see me, but wonder why I am so sad. Are they trying to help? You bet they are.

Writing is one of those things that you're never good at until people say so - and accolades don't matter as much as money. Then, you bounce between hubris and self-doubt. The conceit is the worst. Thinking you can write effortlessly like Bob Dylan's first 100 songs is maddening and only means you've hit an artificial high water mark.

No one should go through it.

Rather, the anxiety over not being good enough is a comfortable friend. One who overlooks your faults - like the time you pulled down his shorts in front of his girlfriend as a prank - yet sees something bright and shining inside you. Self-doubt is like that. It's there when you bottom and really need a shoulder.

So, I hope to find a way to make a living from my writing. Screenplays, stageplays, sitcoms...even novels. They're all on the table. I got a jump on some of them already and hope for more.

But I still need a title for my new chapter of "what will I do to pay the bills." Undecided doesn't do in college majors, voter polls and anywhere else in real life.