The other day as I was writing I heard a sudden, loud
knocking at my office door. I turned my head to see who could have caused such
a ruckus and behold, it was my wife.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she asked.
“Uh, no,” I replied, somewhat in a daze from being pummeled
out of my imaginary world.
“I thought you were ignoring me,” she grumbled. “The trash
stinks. It needs to go out.”
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” I replied. “I’m working on my
latest novel. I was in the zone.”
She turned to head back into the hallway and said; “Well,
can you break away from the zone for a moment and take out the rotting refuse
in the kitchen?”
“Sure,” replied, doing my best to appease this woman who
puts up with all of my eccentricities, quirks, and obsessively reclusive writer
ways. “I’ll do it now.”
Not a very glamorous discussion by any means but it makes my
point. When I start to really get into a story I go into a zone where all
distractions are muted. Time will slip away and my surroundings will blur. This
is creating something from nothing at its finest. There is no television show
or video game that can compare to playing with characters and scenes inside
your own mind. There is no drug or alcoholic drink that can take me to the
places my imagination can. The zone is a place all for myself and I sometimes
regret that I cannot share the zone with anyone else. My wife doesn’t
understand why I sometimes get miffed when she calls me out of the office for
such trivial matters as taking out the trash. My biggest problem is once that
bubble of solitary thought is burst it’s very hard to re-inflate it. She
doesn’t understand that the stinky trash may have just disrupted the war
between the Cyderion and the Defenders in INSECTLAND or allowed Tommy Fielding
to murder another innocent victim in DEGENERATES (had to get some plugs in here
somewhere). I’ve heard athletes talk of the zone, but that’s a physical
dimension. The zone for me is purely mental. And as I finish this blog entry, I
feel the tingly beginnings of the zone coming on and a writing session to
follow. I already checked that the trash cans were empty so I’m good to go.
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