The daffodils and the forsythia are in bloom. Here, in central Ohio, the temperature is supposed to reach seventy-five degrees. Don’t get too comfortable, though; a storm is coming. Tomorrow the high will be forty-seven, and Tuesday, we’ll only reach twenty-seven. So it is in March here in the Midwest as we yo-yo our way through spring.

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I’m a little over halfway through my sabbatical from teaching, and I’ve been trying to work on this new novel every day. Even if other things keep me from spending as much time writing as I’d like, I’ve been very good about spending enough time with the novel to keep me immersed in its world. I’m happy with my progress. I have almost a hundred pages drafted. Today, I sat down to write this post, but first I read through the last section of the book, and I found a couple of places that invited some expansion—the addition of new details, an adjustment of point of view, and finally a question that, if posed, will lead me into the next section of the novel. Just a little tweak here and there to pave the way for tomorrow’s work.

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I was away from the novel last Wednesday through Sunday while Cathy and I attended the annual conference of The Associated Writing Programs, but even while I was there I spent some time daydreaming about my characters and their situations. We sometimes joke about all the time we spend “writing” when we’re staring out the window, but daydreams can be quite productive.

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Already, I see problems with the novel I’m writing—gaps in logic, story threads that go nowhere, character relationships I need to better understand, redundancies, etc. What will I do about these flaws? Nothing for now. I need to keep writing. Completing a draft will show me what I need to do to shore up the unity of the narrative. Sometimes we must know where we’re going to understand how we got there.

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I keep going even though there are times when the whole business of writing and publishing disappoints me. I don’t want to go into detail, but I will say I’m most disappointed by what I’ll call a lack of professional integrity—people who ghost one another, people who take an inordinate amount of time to close the loop on something, backstabbers. We who write and teach put so much of ourselves into our endeavors. All we ask in return is decency and respect.

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Sometimes the world reminds us how inconsequential our disappointments truly are. At the end of last week, I learned one of my writing teachers had died by their own hand. The news was a shock, but it underscored the truth that our perceived slights and betrayals, not to mention our fragile egos and our insecurities, can pale when we consider the overwhelming and invisible pain someone can carry.

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This morning at breakfast, I said to Cathy, “Sometimes I think I just want to be done with the writing and the teaching.” And then what would you do, she wanted to know. So I gave her this half-serious and half-B.S. list: sit and listen to music, read books for pleasure, practice to become a professional bowler, cut my grass and work in my garden, take up target shooting, go to more movies, attend a game in all the major league baseball stadiums, shoot baskets, play air hockey, do more genealogy research, correspond with friends, cook, perfect my imitation of Clint Eastwood, audition for community theatre productions, do more jigsaw puzzles, recall my teenage years when I was in such a hurry for time to move forward, remember how it was in those years when I had dreams and I was impatient to see whether I’d ever be able to realize them.