It's a cold morning here--down to 18 degrees after a dripping, snowmelt day. Surfaces must be slick out there, but all I can see through the pane are streetlights and gray shadow and heaps of pale shoveled lumps edging driveways and sidewalks.

Inside, my Christmas lights are shining and the cat is sleeping and the furnace is growling, and I'm girding my loins for another forehead-to-the-editing-grindstone day. I've made such good progress this week that I might even be able to switch desk chores and finally get started on that book review. Or maybe I'll just keep muscling through the editing project.

I'm still thinking about my embryo manuscript, still thinking about poems, feeling wistful about it all, as if I'm pressing my nose against a shop window. This not-writing is entirely different from writer's block. It's an embargo on letting myself go, until I get the paying work finished, and there's just no way around it.

Still, there's happiness in knowing I've got something waiting for me.