Fiction

I have fiction to write, and I am struggling. Not with the concepts (there is not concept shortage in my mind), or plot developments (they tend to, though don't always, take shape during the writing), or even the characters so much (I only really get to know them when they act, and speak), but with finding time for the process.
         I need to sit down and write. "Ass in chair": the mantra of some writer friends of mine, who heard it from some wise soul, in sometime past. How unappealing though; how static. It is true of course. Writing, prose if not poetry (I will leave that consideration to the poets out there. I am not one. Struggle on friends that are, you have my respect, but your craft may beyond me) takes sustained, concentrated, time. That's it. The key to writing is the time invested. Sure, there is more to it than that. Thousands of people sell themselves on the idea that they know what that "more" is. Some do know, I suppose, and over time I have met writers that, I believe, may really know something about "more". Practically though, all great writing advice is irrelevant if I do not sit my ass down, in my chair, and write. 
           I am not one for sitting, generally. I prefer to run, and stretch. I sit when I read, if I have coffee in the morning, or tea or beer at night. Otherwise, I find myself pacing the warped floorboards of my small living room. I can be on the ground, holding a book to my face with one hand, contorting my back or legs into a stretch with the other. Or maybe I will have one foot on the floor and the heel of the other on the back of a chair, one I should probably be sitting in. I cannot be so active and write. I can pace to think, or jot bits of sentences, or words, or letters onto my walls, which are painted blackboard black. I keep chalk in a plastic beer mug, a novelty from the Holiday Ale Festival in Portland Oregon, that hangs from a nail in a piece of scrap-wood nailed into a wall stud. But these jottings and conjectures are not writing.
             There is blogging too. Though, I have a hard time believing this blog to be a detrimental time eater. Rather, only on my third post in, I begin to find it an almost necessary excercise (thank you to my followers thus far, your kind words have certainly not been overlooked), but its existence is contrary to the point I have been making. I can sit down and write, I just cannot seem sit down a and write fiction.
              I am at work now, behind my desk (or, at least, I was when I began this post) and a certain level of guilt prevents me from popping in my thumb drive and key mashing my way toward a new story. I would not call myself a man of exemplary standards, but this problem is a moral one: I am not getting paid to write. My salary isn't meant to fund blog time either, though I spend hours daily posting links on facebook and twitter, and digg-ing them too. I've earned the online time I steal. Or so I decide (say what you like about my mind and its reasoning, it is the one that will always, ultimately, direct me).
             My thought process should be different. While I'm working I sit. Therefore I should write. But no. My office building is a right turn off of a Westampton, New Jersey thoroughfare. It is an old house that shows three stories from the outside, its top floor beneath a pitched roof studded with dormer windows (I have yet to see this enormous attic space, but know from the stained, warped, ceiling tiles that it is not impervious to rain), and has a staircase that reaches only the second floor. On three sides of the building there are fields. I have thought that they were corn fields.I will wait to see how right, or wrong, I am. The plant that sprouts from them is young, or maybe, just small. I sometimes see groundhogs skirting the fields. With the heat this summer they have often stayed below ground, burrowed in the cooler soil of the hill by the United Way building, or the rehab center just beyond that.
             When sitting at work becomes unbearable, as it always will, I sometimes walk. I walk amongst the buildings that surround my office.They are universally hideous, no two alike in their repugnance. The United Way is plain, and black shingles blown from its roof  litter the parking lot beside it. The pink brick and stucco of the rehab clinic attempts a modest, misguided, modernity. The Lukoil station between two of the fields is a simple  gas station, conspicuous only to the cars with empty tanks. Freighting trailers are parked, unsecured and empty, behind a large, pallid, warehouse. Through the open rolling doors of the loading bays I see mostly unused space. One hundred or so feet of industrial shelving hold roll after roll of something, some substance secured around tubes of thick cardboard and secured by glossy plastic wrap. They might be giant rolls of carpet. Then again, they might be nothing more than rolls of plastic wrap. One day, I've begun to promise myself, I will walk through the open doors and find out just what it is that building holds.
             Today, however, I passed by the warehouse for the peculiar artificial pond beyond it. On overcast days the water appears dirty to its depths and the large goldfish that swim in it are only visible in the shallows by the banks. Small toads jump whenever I approach. The structure of a fountain rest atop a pole and gathers dust. There are two concrete blocks of unrevealed function that sit precariously on the verge of the water. Atop these blocks I have no trouble sitting. The view is of the whole scene: roads, fields, buildings. What I see, it looks like fiction.