Just write, I told myself. The aliens hadn’t yet arrived in my head, but I can’t wait for the aliens. I need to write. If you’re not writing, you’re standing still, (with the caveats, naturally, that if you’re editing, polishing, rewriting, etc., you are still engaged in the writing process, so you’re technically still writing).

These aren’t things I say out loud. Friends and relatives probably don’t know that my increased quiet is because I’m dreaming about aliens, trying to entice them out of the air and into my head (kind of like the old Billy Ocean song, “Get out of my dreams, and into my car.” I had asked my wife and others what aliens they like in books, films and games, or who were their favorite aliens. Great conversation fodder. The baristas, twenty year old women, were into it, and the barista today created an alien on my mocha. She then brought the alien topic up for her co-worker, who didn’t work yesterday when I asked, re-invigorating the conversation.

I derived beautiful thoughts from all these words. Yet the aliens remained nebulous, refusing to get into my car. Just write, I told myself, and they will come. Okay, so what will I write? I was picking up the scenes already created. They’re wonderful stepping stones, and although I wasn’t quite to the scene that arose to be written today, I shrugged. Okay, that’s what I’ll write, and then I’ll write the bridge to it from where I’m at later. No Big Deal. I write like this all the time, seeing what is to be and writing it because I want to, and then returning to bridge the pieces together.

So what happens in the novel today? This happens, and then that happens, and then, boom, there it is, writing stuff about aliens and plot exploding into me, firing off flares and tracers that illuminated what is to be.

Beautiful. Yeah, here I go, just write like crazy, one more time. Let the rest worry itself.