It’s not that I can’t work like a stevedore when necessary. I’ve often stayed up all night to write when I’m on a roll. And last fall, as I typed “The End" to a novel that had consumed me for months, my husband suggested that I adjust my writing schedule for the next book to something more sane than 70 hours a week.

But now I’m into revisions of that same novel. And though I have lots of ideas sifting through my brain, and I’ve jotted down any number of notes, I can feel the weight of all that prose that has to be shifted and rearranged. There’s a driveway of a story underneath it all, but just now all I can see is a vast expanse of editor suggestions, agent comments, reader reactions, and my own damp, heavy, lumpish first attempts at revising.

Sometimes the words just don’t come. Sometimes the winter hangs on and hangs on. The clear path is there, under the snow, but just looking at the effort it will take to clear it is daunting, to say the least.

Still...

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