Today I shall write

Today I shall write.  I shall write the most stunning prose ever.  My words will rival those of Milton, Mitchener, Rowling and King.  Sentences will flow with ease and every word will appear as though it was meticulously planned when in reality they spilled onto the page to tempt and delight.  My characters will be so well-formed that the reader will feel as though they are their best friends.  My villains will be heinous and my heroes strong, bold, and deliciously beautiful. The heroine will be no femme fatale, but a confidant and capable woman who is still sexy and alluring.  The plot will be riveting and the reader will languish in bed captivated by each chapter or, sadly, the reader will be stuck at work wishing the hours to whisk away so that they can get back to the book that is calling to them from their coffee table.  It will cross gender lines and be adored by both staunch conservative and radical liberal alike.  My writing today will be hailed as this decade's most entertaining and important work of fiction.  The Washington Post will announce that it is a
"Must Read!"  Yes! Today the words themselves will be my muse!

Actually I'm probably going to write a whole lot of shit today that will be edited and slashed and rewritten tomorrow, but the above paragraph is how I want to write each day.  I wake up with the intention of writing well and when I review it later I wonder what idiot sat at my computer and put that stupid drivel in my book.  But that is what the writing process is about.  I am sure that there are few authors who are a pleasure to edit.  Whose manuscripts are clean and polished and ready for the world.  I have had the pleasure of talking to quite a few published authors (some of them even well-known and well-read) who have griped about having to go through the editing process.  The authors I follow on Twitter remind me daily that writing is not something we do, but something we perfect.  It is a continuous work in progress until it has been printed and delivered to stores.  And by that time there is more work to be done on the next book.

So today I most likely will not channel Shakespeare or Goethe or even Austin.  Today I will regurgitate a couple thousand words and hopefully they will form some kind of sentence structure and arrange themselves into paragraphs and when I look at it again tomorrow it would look like a two-year old pounded on my keyboard.  And I shall be thankful for spellcheck.