The writing happens first in my inward ear, which hears the words spoken, intoned, canted, preached, recited, depending on what’s being said. Then the task is to remember that inward voice, and make sense of it on the written page. Sometimes the inward ear starts hearing things at odd moments, like this morning when I was crunching on a piece of toast until Carol said, interrupting, “You know you said you could, well could you do it something like this,” and she showed me what she meant, and we talked about it, and I said, Yes, I would do it. By then, whatever that inward voice had been saying was lost, but who cares? What Carol says, no matter how mundane or matter-of-fact, is always worth more than something that is meant to be written down. The problem lies in the voice which speaks in the inward ear; I can ignore it for a time, but the best way to keep it under control is to keep writing. Now you know why I write too much for this blog.