I am tired tonight but still I am writing. I don’t know if anyone actually reads this or if anyone ever will. It’s that way with many of the things I write — the things I write for pleasure, anyway, for myself as opposed to the endless ads and posters and bookmarks and brochures I bang out from nine to five every day. I am not sure who reads the real stuff, the good stuff. Sometimes I believe the words are read and they penetrate. Sometimes I don’t. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I write them anyway. I write them because I want to and because I have to, sometimes I write when I don’t even notice I am doing it.

I am tired tonight but still there are words to share, words to craft and shape and puzzle together. They are coming slower now, it’s true. Tonight, the words are sleepy, too. The pictures still some, the still-amorphous ideas that will shift and slide and eventually gel into something I can use somewhere, fit somewhere. Or they won’t. Some words never fit or haven’t so far. It doesn’t matter. Still they come and someone has to write them down. It might as well be me. Sometimes I think it has to be me.

I am tired tonight but I am proud. I am proud that my clacking fingers make words and sentences, form ideas and the beginnings and endings of stories true and false. I am glad there is an internet for my words. It is a far cry and a nice change from all the old notebooks and scratch pads hidden under the bed and lost behind bureaus, all the napkins and scraps with half-sentences and trailing paragraphs. I am glad I have a place to keep it all, where I can choose to share it, to put it out there, wherever there turns out to be. I hope someone is reading; I hope a lot of someones are reading, if not now then eventually. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. And though I am tired tonight, I am a tired writer. And that, my invisible friends, is what matters.