Shake the Hand of Any Published Author You Know

It turns out that once a person goes from the general "I want to write something, sometime" phase to the actual act of sitting down and writing, things get very complicated. I now understand what Jeff Smith-Luedke (himself a twice-published author) meant when he railed against people who are going to write a novel "once they have the time." There are so many more thing involved than time.

I'm starting to appreciate that as I'm transitioning from my general desire to be a writer to actually doing it.  The ideas only connect themselves into something even remotely worthwhile after hours and hours of painfully refusing to cooperate. If the first sentence didn't take hours, its probably no good.

So as I begin this long and difficult process of pulling this story out of my mind and expressing it just so on paper, wish me luck.  Here I go.