Remember the old Gene Autry song, "I'm back in the saddle again"?  Today I'm reminded of that ditty.  What saddle?  The writing saddle, of course.  If any of my sister crones think she has a story or two to tell, there's only one way to do it.  As Nike says, "Just Do It".  It's a matter of application and discipline.  The discipline comes in when you sit down on the chair, and put your fingers on the keyboard, willing words to come into your mind.  Just get something down.  You can always clean it up on the rewrite.  The important thing is that you're doing it, you're writing, dammit.  If you have to, take the phone off the hook, and minimize all your chat windows.I don't have to.  I can write and chat at the same time.  The people I talk to understand when there's a long pause in between utterances.  One friend of mine appreciates those long pauses because he says I type too fast.  Well, if I typed so fast, I'd have had a straight job all these years.  But as I said in the interview on blog talk radio on March 1st, it's a matter of application, of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,  fingers to the keyboard, and mind to the task.

But a true writer doesn't write because she wants to.  A true writer writes because she has to.  Because when she isn't writing she's at least a little bit crazy, and the world isn't wagging quite right.  She longs to get into that grand obsession in her work.  It's much better to be obsessed over writing, than it is to be obsessed over a person.  There are fewer bad results that way, you aren't breaking up any homes, or stalking anybody.  Whatever homicides that result are all fictional, all in your mind and in your manuscript.  There won't be cops at your door.  There may be cops at your character's door, but that's all right.  That's fiction.  You can put all your grand delusions into your fiction.  Nobody will bother you, or put you into the psych ward.  

Writing is also great therapy.  I developed a thing called "Crime fiction therapy."  Whenever I was mad at someone, I'd write a story in which that person got murdered.  I could express all of my rage, and have a worthwhile product at the end. Then my cop character would solve the crime. My shrink and my therapist approved.  I let them read the stories.  They thought it was a very creative way of expiating my anger and rage.