On Writing and Wishing

Twenty-three days to go, and I am no nearer a Christmas book than I was when I felt the spark of an idea about two weeks ago.  The annual panic has set in, consuming me live like the no-see-ums dragonflies feed on so rapaciously.  

I am told that an insect doesn't suffer when dying: it shuts down, goes into a kind of physical stasis.

Not me.  

When the composition disease strikes, I become itchy-titchy and distracted, latching on to any impulse pulling me in any off-target direction.  It's not enough, for example, to walk the lake and take photographs (umpteen more of Autumn Meadowhawks as though the hundreds I have already shot aren't sufficient), but then I come home and play with them, using Photoshop as a delaying tactic without equal.

I have an image I like now.

But it's not enough to like this image.  I am not writing about dragonflies for Christmas (though I wish I had written this description published in this week's New Yorker: "Green Darners never attack people, but they have been seen bringing down hummingbirds.  They are the Bengal tigers of the microworld.").

Mine is another topic altogether, and words fail me.

Today, I am no Bengal tiger: I am a hummingbird, and the looming deadline, a Darner.