Friday, May 11, 2012

The zone

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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