Keep on truckin'

              Back in the day, long before Cherry Garcia twinkled in  Ben & Jerry's eyes, there was a band called The Grateful Dead.

The Dead put out an album called American Beauty  that featured a song called Truckin'. 

      (Perhaps self-prophesying their future linkage with Ben & Jerry's, the Dead would also put out a live album featuring a kid sticking an ice cream cone in his head. But, of course, I digress.) 

         What I really want to talk about is Truckin', which has been recognized by the United States Library of Congress as a National Treasure, and how we keep doing it. Or not.  (And you thought I'd never get around to writing, right? Ah, ye of little faith.)
        These are the opening lyrics:

Truckin' - got my chips cashed in

Keep Truckin - like the doodah man

Together - more or less in line

Just keep Truckin on  

         The point of the foregoing is this: We've all just got to keep on truckin'.

            As you can seen from the date of this blog post and its predecessor,  I've had a little trouble doing that lately. Stuff has got in my way. It has also gotten in Lara & Cole's way, but I try to keep them appeased with a tweak here and a tweak there, at the very least.

            The stuff that has got in my way is not stuff that prevents my butt from being glued to my chair; it is just stuff that makes my mind wander. Distractions. I think those of us who do not face deadlines regularly may be led astray more easily than those of us who do. ("Oh, look, a cloud.") 

            But as Twitter makes clear, even famous authors under contract pressure sometimes have one of those days where they Just.Can't.Write. Others are desolated by rejections, are waiting, waiting, waiting to hear about submissions, or have let so much time go by since they last put pixel to screen that they have to struggle to recapture the feeling, rediscover the zone. 

           So I thought I would start a new page up top, which I'm going to call "Truckin.'"  I'm going to try to chronicle what I've done each day, even if, as today, all I've done is tinker a bit. I hope you will join me in keeping track of how far you've come and what you're doing or planning on doing, and whether or not you've met your goal for the day. You can comment on the Truckin' page whenever you feel like it.

           Dr. Wicked's Write or Die might inspire some of you.
           Come on, play along.

           You don't want to be this guy, do you?