The Imaginary Crowd grows ever more agitated. I hear a word whispered again and again in tones, both hushed and open. “Riot,” they say.

The chickens babble away insanely in their own gibbering conspiracy. I am watchful but loath to intervene. I value my hide and the hide that covers my chair.

Good news has been flowing in unabated and entirely welcome. The good news brings with it work and soon I shall share it unto you, my dearest readership. When I can make an announcement that’ll spread like oil over storm-tossed seas, both illuminating it with fire, and calming the raging depths.

Alas I can’t say nothing and these lips are sealed (at least announcement wise) for the moment so I shall write instead of frustration.

I imagine it’s a writer’s lot, is good ole frustration. It hounds at your heels when a word or phrase refuses to appear. There’s been times when I’ve sought a word so dearly and ardently, like a hunter searching for some mythical beast of old, that I’ve dashed hand upon desk.

I feel it nipping even now, taking little chunks of annoyance out of my soul. I thrash my hands about, flailing like a madman, and it cowers away by inches. But it always comes slinking back as a whisper, a sigh and sometimes a roar.

At its lowest, frustration is an immobilizing force, paralyzing with intensity. At its highest it galvanises me to achieve, to rise higher, above its murky depths. Sometimes it does both.

Such is the state I find myself in now as I rack my brain for ideas and thus drive them away. Bars are being set, higher and higher, reaching unto the very heavens of personal achievement.

My mantra has become, “Be as the sponge and soak up the stories that lay about you.”

So I hope and pray that what emerges from the sloshing pile of fluid and flesh that lies at the heart of my head is worthwhile, compelling and interesting whilst simultaneously creating entertainment.

In the end I know that frustration is but a prelude, the opening stages to a symphony of glory. I just have to get out of the muck, the mixed metaphors and the mire to hear the music.