A lifelong goal fulfilled.

“I needed a system for finding the dead animals on the side of the road.” About four years ago, I typed these words in a dark room lit only by the monitor in front of me and those words.

Let me back up a little. I am a writer. Even though my career took me in a different direction, the writer emerged from time to time with ideas and ambitions. In younger days, I had started a half dozen or so novels or screenplays. Wrote short stories (for free) for a freebie tabloid. However, I tended to get into projects and lack whatever it took to finish. Once the project started to transition from cool idea with potential into the area of hard work, my will to stick with it always seemed to fade.

About four years ago, I had an epiphany that, when I had started these other never-to-be-completed projects, it was the potential that I was enamored with, not the process, not the work. I would talk to my friends about how I was writing a novel or screenplay, and would describe the story idea. It was all about the “dig me” of it. I’m working on a screenplay… I’m cool! But when I would sit down to work on it, I was easily distracted by how great my life was going to be when I published it or sold it to Hollywood.

So I wrote the line about the dead animal system, committed to being in the moment and deriving as much joy as possible from the work, the writing.

And for four years, I wrote when I felt like it. When work situations were bad, the novel was a buddy I could hang out with. When work was good, I might go a couple months without touching it. On nights I had trouble falling asleep, I could think about the next part of the story, instead of what was actually stressing me out. And I never really talked about it, and especially told no one what it was about.

When I was laid off in December, I had just finished the first draft and knew I had a long road of revising and rewriting ahead of me. Then along came this enormous chunk of time. I no longer had to be at my cubicle at 8:30 a.m. I no longer found myself exhausted, just arriving home at 6:30. I decided that if I found a job in a couple of months and had not finished this novel, I would regret it.

So a couple of weeks ago, during my revisions, I wrote the last line: “It then continued circling slowly upward, and I watched it through the viewer, bringing the camera closer to my eyes, trying to maintain the visual image, until the insect’s size in my viewer shrunk to less than a single pixel and it disappeared from my sight.” Followed by “THE END.”

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