I've written 22 pages of a play I'm tentatively calling "Night, With Ebon Pinion," which is actually the name of a late 19th century church hymn we used to sing in our church when I was growing up.

The play is not about the song itself, it merely acts as a centrifugal role in the action of the main character, Shep Danvers. That is to say, the song is a force within Shep that powers itself outward and acts upon the play's (Shep's) main action (what he wants).

And isn't that the way things are? We have things (past events, thoughts, damages - perceived and real) within ourselves that we are sure are buried deep enough; issues so embedded in the rock of our memory that they will never see the light of day even with the sharpest of miner's picks. And yet, somehow they manage to surface greater and with more meaning than we ever thought possible.

I'm struggling with this story. Greatly. Because it is a fundamental departure from my first published piece, Surfacing, which is a novel for young adults with a female main character who lives in the future and miles beneath the surface of the earth.

Folks, there isn't a shred of me in that novel, and that was done on purpose by yours truly. I've wanted more than anything in my life to be a writer, and when the time came for me to move to the level of published writer, I chickened out.

Maybe that's not fair. I love Surfacing for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it is my firstborn. I love its story and its characters. But it is pure, unadulterated fantasy. The kind of what-if storytelling that you do when you're 10 and have the luxury of idling through your days scheming cool stories about superheroes and space flight and ... well ... unreality.

But I'm nothing if not all about the real. As an adult - since about the age of 22 - my story ideas have sprung from an inner well, as opposed to from something outside of my own experience.

So why then did I write a kid's book at 38 when I've got "serious" stories lined up in my mind like 727s on a tarmac?

Fear. Guilt. Shame.

That's the holy triumvirate of writers. The big three reasons we don't write what we know. Fear of failure. Fear of success at the expense of alienating our loved ones. Guilt about the revelation of "family secrets" (when we know deep down that these are amalgams of people and events, not biographies); shame brought on from the pain of that guilt.

I cannot tell you the number of titles I have started atop a blank page, the numerous paragraphs I have devoted to writing from the heart, only to see them balled up and tossed unceremoniously into a wastebasket.

So back to 'Night'. I will not reveal what the play is "about" because I don't know yet. It's unfinished, you see. And I refuse to tell you what happens, because then I won't write it. I learned that lesson a long time ago.

What I will share - or I thought I was sharing - is my sense of danger every time I sit down to write. I feel like I'm on an emotional precipice as I roll my chair up to my keyboard and look at the computer screen. Kind of like hanging your toes over the edge of the Grand Canyon and peering down. Am I taking a foolish risk by flirting with the edge? And what is this overwhelming desire to just fucking leap? To hell with gravity and the consequences.

I read what I have written (a cardinal sin, but one I am compelled to commit) and I "like" what is there. It's walking a path on its own and its pace and movement is natural - when it moves at all; when it isn't tethered by the aforementioned Big Three, which is frequent.

I guess an analogy would be to use a Jack London scenario. A man is in the rocky wilderness of the southwest, on a stony path. The only path he can take to get to safety. It's a journey that must happen under the cover of darkness of night (of course!!), and along the way he must go uphill (of double course!!). He is stalled by tripping roots and troublesome stones (guilt); he is thwarted by a buffeting wind that threatens to toss him over the edge of the cliff to his right (shame) and even if he succeeds in overcoming those, up ahead he hears a telltale rattle and does not know under which boulder the snake is hidden (fear.)

I like this. I hate it but I love it because I know now that the completion of the play has little to do with being successful and almost everything to do with what writing is supposed to be about.

Room With A Lesser View

I am moving my office from the moderately large bedroom at the back of the house, with its window that overlooks the pond and rolling acreage, to a moderately cramped bedroom in the middle of the house with a window that overlooks the neighbor's basketball hoop and leaf-littered lawn.

The move is to appease my oldest daughter and has nothing to do with the view. In fact, I went to great pains not to enjoy the view from my previous office because it was way too easy a distraction. Let's see: look at apple trees and a pond and a bank of trees, or write. Hmmmmmmm. (I have included an image of the back yard here, for your viewing pleasure)

When we moved into our house we gave the children the pick of the bedrooms, starting with Fallon, the oldest. She chose the largest in the house: a palatial chunk of real estate, with five windows, a fireplace (capped, but still pretty cool) and a telephone hookup.

As it turns out, Fallon feels more like she's sleeping in a museum than a bedroom, what with the lack of furniture to dull the echo. She has a bed, a bureau, a slender bookshelf, a sewing table, and a hairbrush. This leaves an acre of floor in the middle of the room, give or take.

Gabrielle, an infant when we moved in, is now mobile in the worst of ways, which means she needs her own space. So we're doing the bedroom shuffle thusly:

• We're moving into Fallon's bedroom
• Fallon is moving into my old office
• Ty, once with the tiniest bedroom in the house has moved to Alyssa's third floor roost (which also has a window looking out over the pond, just from a higher angle)
• Alyssa has moved across the hall to Harrison's old room, the one on whose wall I painted the Green Monster and whose ceiling has a skylight
• Harrison has moved to the first-floor bedroom off the kitchen once occupied by my sister, who has moved across the street into her boyfriend's house (now THAT's how you get a date: pick the fella across the street. It saves moving expenses)
• Gabrielle has staked a claim on our old bedroom, but let's be real, she sleeps with us
• I have moved my office into the tiniest of rooms.

I sit there now, after having moved two thirds of my possessions yesterday. Two thirds of my possessions is code for MY BOOKS. (the other third comprises clothes I don't wear, clothes I wear over and over, a pair of dress shoes, sandals, a toothbrush)

This tiny bedroom-turned-office has a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf seven tiers tall and perhaps 10 feet in width. And my books just about fill it.

My desk is in the corner opposite the bookshelf, kitty corner, so that as I type this I can detect, peripherally, my books but can also see the outline of trees through the window. Not a great distraction, but enough light to inspire, which is the best kind of window a writer should have.

The house, built in 1850 during John McCain's first run for the presidency, is slightly pitched toward the middle. Door casings slope toward center, as do the floors, the stairs, the windows. Anything made of wood, let's say. In fact, my second-oldest brother complains that he needs to be drunk in order to walk a straight line in my home.

This means my office - my NEW office - slopes too. So I sit here, kitty corner to the bookshelf and the window-without-a-view, and my office-chair-on-casters rolls toward the door.

Picture a Charlie Chaplin movie that takes place on a steamer ship. Poor Charlie is trying to eat soup at a table with the room continually pitching left and right, the soup bowl sliding away from him just as he dips his spoon, then slides back to him, teasingly.

That's me, except the house doesn't tip me back to my desk. I have to use my legs, Fred Flinstone style, to get back. It's a muscle-pulling kind of exercise. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, I know - something about outside forces pulling me away from writing - and I'd write it down if I could just GET BACK TO MY COMPUTER!

Anyway. I'm back. Breathless, as it were, from the exertion. But I'm enjoying my new office. I think I'll peruse my books, the ones I've neglected for two years and will now probably re-neglect, but hey, they look way cooler in their floor-to-ceiling bunks. It just LOOKS like a writer's bookshelf. Stephen Kingsian, let's say. I wish I had a pipe right now.

Or maybe I'll just take time out to enjoy the view of my neighbor's ...um... driveway.