Ah yes, celebrations. Don’t we love them? Confetti, balloons, music and dancing, eating and drinking, all because we met a deadline or finished a manuscript. Maybe we even got the final edit over with and the actual book is delivered to our front door. Ah, yes; celebration indeed.

Hold your horses. Before we enjoy that celebration, we first must struggle through the pain of cell-ah-bray-shun.

One by one, alone and sometimes lonely, we hover in small cell-like cubicles around the world, with nothing but sparse white paper to keep us company.

Our words imprison us, confining us while our attention is arrested by verbs, nouns, and forlorn modifiers that dangle from places they should not be.

Once in a long while, a certain phrase stands out masterfully from a million others. We applaud our cleverness with ah’s and oh’s, sure that some publisher will see our brilliance with the same fervour we do. We scribble on with the hope of more to come.

Finally, we finish our masterpiece and the braying begins. We brace ourselves for the leaving of that lonely cell. For now, we must market our pages to anyone who stops long enough to hear a phrase.

We query, we post, and we social media into oblivion, but our hearts linger in the cell, not really into salesmanship. Why? Because we are writers, lovers of the cell block, masters of the jailhouse, prisoners of the word. Our heads sit apart from our sales pitch for therein steep the plans for the sequel.

Before you know it, the shun part takes over. Again we lock ourselves to our keyboard and strive for excellence. Celebration? No indeed. Rather we live the life of cell-ah-bray-shun, for this is the true life of the serious writer.

Brenda J. Wood is a motivational speaker and author.
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