To do (with my writing life) list:

- Write a novel or memoir that is good,

     that means something to someone (preferably many someones),

     that sells many copies,

     and makes me enough money that everyone I love never has to worry about money,

     and makes me enough money that I can, for the rest of my life, cook all of my meals from Mark Bittman & Barefoot Contessa cookbooks.

- Write a novel or memoir that wins me a prestigious (well, really, any) writing award,

     and makes all of the MFA writing programs that rejected me weep with regret and beg me to come teach in their MFA programs,

     where I will become a well-loved professor,

     and write a second book that becomes so famous that President Obama reads it and loves it and I get to meet him.

- Write a book that vindicates all of the support and encouragement given to me by the people who continue to believe in me despite my repeated failures.

- Write enough books that I can dedicate at least one each to all of these supportive people.

...And yet it was a day of lost causes, of ideas thought up one moment and sent into oblivion the next, never to be retrieved.

I stomped my feet under my desk all day, and took a hot shower to cool off.  Made two pots of coffee, but only drank half of one.

It was a day of self-doubt with self-loathing mixed in like swirls of white chocolate in a sea of dark.  Except it tasted bitter.

And after much typing, my Word document is still blank, called "Document 1."  I never even figured out a title--something to call this thing I'm doing.

Someone once wrote, tomorrow is another day...