Death is not worse pain than an empty life. -- Lun Tha

I write a weekly column. Well, most weeks. I'd venture to say that 48 out of 52 weeks, I get my column done. It's not a paying gig, but I enjoy being able to share oddments from my cluttered desk with people.

Thing is, I'm not a journalist. Never have been. I have always been a "seat of my pants" kind of writer. Queen of the First-and-Only Drafters. Exceptions are my fiction and my Masters thesis. The latter was written well over a decade ago. I worked on that for a while, as you can imagine.

Anyway. My column. Inspiration comes...or it does not. If it comes, then I sit down with a smile on my face and light fingers on the keyboard and rattle something out in fifteen minutes that works for that week. Sometimes, I'm inspired by scripture (Proverbs being a favorite for the nature of the column) and other times I get inspiration from my children or the children of others. *waves at The Journalist's Daughter*

When inspiration doesn't sparkle along my neurons, though, I'm stuck. I'll try This Idea and it'll collapse under its own idiocy. That Idea peters out after fifty words. The Other Notion will evaporate after a paragraph or three. Those are columns that I sometimes just abandon all idea of a theme and just start to write. Whatever stray word crosses my brain, I'll stick it in as a topic heading and just go.

That's what happened this week.

Odd thing, though. I wrote, trying only to tie one paragraph with another, and I found it...way down around the 600th word. My theme. Odd, how that happened.

Now, if I'd been Dave Barry , I'd have gone back and rewritten the entire column. That would have been good writing. Take that theme! Restructure your whole column! Make it great!!!

But, instead, I didn't. First Draft Queen, here, remember? I left it alone, grateful to have come up with a theme...eventually...even if I didn't make it a work of literary merit.

I suppose that's lame. But sometimes, that's just how it happens. I'll just hope that next week...maybe...I'll find that "theme" a bit earlier.

It could happen.