Yes. I procrastinate. I’m stubborn and willful, and I don’t always have my nose to the grindstone or my shoulder to the wheel. In fact, I can often be found staring off into space, a posture—I assure my children—that means I’m thinking.

And I am thinking.

Maybe I’m not thinking about the subject at hand: the review that needs written, the manuscript languishing on my desktop, the contracts that need signed and the prizes awarded. Maybe I’m amusing myself on the inside by creating clever dialogue or imagining how the Puget Sound region looks in the moonlight.

Maybe I’m picturing bare chested men in kilts.

Maybe I don’t have a clue what I’ve been doing for the last three hours, but I figure my mind has been in there, churning through the massive amounts of data it perceives day in and day out, the emails, the requests, and the demands of an intricate novel and I just checked out for a bit.

I do meditation tapes. I tap into the Great Universe, creatively speaking, and rest my weary little gray cells a couple of times a day. Or maybe I’m just taking a snooze.

And if something interrupts me while I’m writing, it might take me an hour to get back into the zone before I can start again. That’s sometimes just the way it is.

I don’t know if this is true of all creative types or not, but I know for myself that all I need to do is show up. Maybe I don’t appear to be doing anything. My kids might say I spend my day staring off into space. But when the time comes and the words flow, I’m there, ready to commit them to paper. In fact, I have goals that I have to meet every day, and somehow, every day, I get things accomplished.

It’s hard to explain to the loved ones that while they see me doing nothing, I’m actually getting a lot done.

That is the creative life, and I wouldn’t change it for anything…