Write Wedding

"You've written your best book since you got married," my wife said. She's write, excused me, she's right. I had feared that my writing output and quality would go down once I tied the knot, but the opposite is true.

We are a few weeks away from our first anniversary. I finished Rattlesnake Wedding, my best book, and wrote a very solid draft of a science fiction book. Not to mention this blog which several thousand of you have already read. I was extremely single the entire time when I wrote my first novel, Rattlesnake Lawyer, and it took ten YEARS to finish. Those weren't a happy ten years.

With the exception of the "writer's room" on a TV sitcom, where people crack themselves up by pitching jokes, writing is a solitary pursuit. Even the only dialogue in the writing process--getting "notes" from an editor --is hardly a social experience. An editor emails you an annotated copy of your book, and you click on accepting the changes. After awhile you forget that a person is asking you to make those changes, and it feels like your own manuscript is nagging at you to stop using the word "I" so much in the same paragraph.

Since I've been married, I still write by myself, but I am not alone. I sip gourmet coffee now as opposed to slamming an energy drink. When I was single, the sound of a passing car would break my train of thought, just think about what the sound of a passing train used to do. Now the sounds of my wife getting ready in the morning actually inspire me to write faster. It's better to get a thousand words out and join someone for breakfast, then get nine hundred words and gobble a power bar.

I do know a few writers who got divorced while writing their books. I won't be one of them.