There's a million stories... on the dirty streets, right? If you remember your noir.

I hear the "Just So" stories a lot. The explanation after the fact. That's the part where we are rationalizing, not rational. Meaning, we can explain what happened, but planning it ahead of time, now there's the rub.

Engineers know the feeling. Difference between operational, day to day engineering, and planning for what may come, or doing new things.

Writers have the just write part of our job, the one where it's sit down and do. I lump in all the various methods, whether you try and plot in advance, or dive in every day and follow your nose. Either way, there's the magic of the moment, of the just shut and write portion of your day.

Doing something in cold-blooded fashion requires a different... what does it require then? Depends on what it is you're tackling.

Engineers don't tella pipefitters or mechanics how to do their bit, though. They design, they map out, they estimate. But they don't detail schedule (depends on the situation, that's typically where the contractors get involved) and order and do the nuts and bolts part of getting the thing built.

Meaning? The cold blooded necessity of the business side of things has a different place and time than the immediate hot rush of writing. And there's likely to be less of that "Do A, then B, then C and D and" linear chaining than you might think. Sitting down to draw out a process, the design part?

Isn't cold-blooded either. That's the creation part. In fact, even the schedulers and the orderers and the other organization people have to fall in love with their job, have to get (if not the blood pounding, then) the little bit of head rush that accompanies the drawing forth, the calling, the summoning of something new into this world.

The trick then is to keep the steps finite, countable. Write-format-publish, and then the next level up, the promo and the... the other levels of the ladder. Here's where not only do we get to create ourselves, our careers. Here's where, just like the lust that drives paragraph and quick quip and the bleeding comma and the run-on sentence and the poetry of the thing, here's where we get to take our time and find the passion of the publish side of the thing. One bit at a time, one night at a time.

What does it for you? What keeps you coming back, to the blank page, to the blank cover, to the empty forms on the upload pages... what makes it so that this is fun? What you do when there's nothing else to do? Or in preference to anything else that might come along?