Author Luncheon

Monday a few authors met for lunch a a local pizza restaurant. It's always fun to meet with others afflicted by the writer's affliction. You may have experienced it.

The uncontrollable urge to put thoughts onto paper.
Conversations with characters that only exist in your mind and on the screen.
A muse gently whispering in your ear -- or slapping you on the back of the head when you don't respond to the whispers.
Waking up with a thought, thinking you'll remember it, not writing it down, and not being able to recall it ten minutes later.
Better, wake up, write it down.
Itching fingertips that only tapping on the keyboard will relieve.
Ideas straining to reach out of your mind and come to life on the screen. And when they do, they don't look nearly as amazing as they did in your head...until they've gone through six or seven revisions.
Feeling sick as you read over the first draft you spent hours, days, weeks, months, years on. Because it's so bad, bad, bad. And then realizing nobody else ever needs to see it, and recovering your senses enough to start editing, rewriting, and revising.

If not. That's okay. What matters in the end is the reader. Who sees the final polished product, and who is carried into a make-believe world, with people who don't exist, going through trials and heartaches that would force a monk with a vow of silence to scream, and loving every minute of it.