Wanted: Those who love a lonely job

It has been said, by someone more important than I, someone who knows the world better and who says things others remember so well, that writing is a lonely job.  It is more than lonely, it is thankless most times.

I do not know why writers write.  Why poets po (small pun), why storytellers tell anymore than I know why the wind tastes sweeter at the top of a mountain, surrounded by honeysuckle, mountain laurel and sourwood, by vistas that make the eyes ache at the seeing of them. 

Perhaps it is a wicked muse that haunts them, that filles their sleeping and their waking with the same dreams they must take up pen and put on paper.  That muse not letting them rest till they change and tweak and twitch words and lines till they seem to fit like a puzzle or a glove upon the hand of the writer's soul.  Or perhaps it is just till they are the flavor the muse seeks...hungers for and dines upon.

Of course that muse is never sated, never full and always seeking the next taste.

Perhaps it is the fleeting chance of fame... nope, that cannot be it, for I would have stopped by now, knowing that fame will never arrive by mail or delivered to my door.  I do not believe fame knows my zipcode.

Perhaps it is the need to say things that rest on the tongue, on the mind that will not let the writer stop and sleep.  Perhaps it is a hope that something one says will touch a heart, change a mind.  Perhaps the teller of tales will keep the memory of a time, a place alove and not lost.  Perhaps, dear cousin, the folks who stood in that time and place will not be forgotten, but immortalized by the memories and tapping of the writer's computer.  Perhaps the love and life they gave will rest in the minds of the reader.

Therefore, dear reader, I write.  I must at times, I do at others.  It is a play pretty one rolls in their minds and plays with when the mind is idle.

Sometimes, however it is good to know that someone is on the other side of the writer's mirror, looking back. 

So, Let me know if you are there.  Unlike the comic on the well lit stage, I cannot hear you breathing in the darkness.  Speak up, leave a message to mark your passing as you read.  Let me know that you stopped by and sat for a while.  Pat the old pooch on the head and say, "good boy".

It'll make my tail wag, I betcha.

Stephen the Storyteller