Now I have two books in development. Last week I talked about my next collection of blog posts. I’m still organizing that one, but now I have given myself permission to take another collection off the back burner.

For three or four years, I have been tinkering with the idea of accumulating my thoughts about writing into a book, which has always had the working title Write anything until you write Something.

A couple of things held me back. First, there are oodles of books about writing; what good would it do to toss another one into that ocean? Second, I have published 17 books, and the next one to sell as many as 100 copies will be the first one. What can a writer with virtually no sales offer readers?

Recently I have returned to an old habit that I had been neglecting, a habit that is essential if a person wants to be a writer: I started reading again, and especially I started reading books about writing and the creative process. Last year I read only 31 books — it had been years since I averaged less than a book a week — and then I read only five books in the first four months of 2026. What especially got my attention was the zero books I read in March, but it took me another month to overcome the inertia.

I devoured five books in May and finished a sixth on June 1. This week I’m three-quarters of the way through a revisit of Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful book about a creative life, Big Magic, and Friday morning my brain exploded and I wrote the introduction to my book about writing.

Goes like this:

How dare I write a book about writing? Nobody has ever heard of me.

That’s not the point. I am a writer. I have been writing all of my life, and my life has been long by many standards. I have been alive longer than my father’s mother, longer than my older brother, and longer than my dear wife, all who were older than I was when the count began.

My point is that I was writing that whole time. I never stopped writing.

Because writers write. It’s our whole purpose — not to be famous, not to go down in history, not to make best-seller lists, but to write — to explore the infinite ways that words can dance, to find joy in the interplay, to delight in the play, to play as a child plays in the dirt, to make mud pies with words, to make the words sing with or without a melody.

To write anything until you write Something.

And once you’ve done that, to keep on writing.