Whatever works, I guess

I'm back. At least my ability to put words together on a page is back, for now.

I have no idea how this works. Last month, I couldn't string a sentence together. I'd just stare at the page, coming up with nothing. Nothing. Now, for no apparent reason, the old gray matter is ready to work again.

In the last month or so I've taken a minor break from writing. It seems to have helped. Part of it was involuntary, of course, I couldn't do it even when I wanted to. The other part was just circumstance. I took a few road trips.

Early in October I drove over to Pittsburgh to meet up with an old buddy from NJ, and to watch the Devils edge out the Penguins -- behind enemy lines. I'd been to Pittsburgh before. It's a lot like my adopted hometown of Cleveland, for as much as residents of both cities like to act as if one or the other is somehow far superior to their rival. I guess that's how people from the rest of the country look at my precious Boston-New York rivalry. Without a dog in the fight, it probably looks like two groups of very similar people, from very similar places who just love to act like they hate each other.

A few weeks later, I ventured further east, to Virginia. With a bunch of fellow attorneys and amateur Civil War buffs, we toured two battlefields, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. I love doing that. some of those places are so pristine, it's like taking a vacation in the 19th century, albeit with a nice hotel suite to go back to at the end of the day.

Funny story, we got lost in the woods, near a thick forest area they called "The Wilderness" during the war. At some point, we did consider resorting to cannibalism if our barely-remembered Cub Scout training proved unable to find us a way out. Luckily we weren't lost for that long, but I'm wondering if I can turn that into some kind of a horror story.

So now, like magic, I come home and find that I'm able to write again. Maybe it was just the R&R that hit the "reset" button on my current manuscript. Then again, there's nothing quite like a real-life discussion of human sacrifice to get the creative juices flowing.