The life of a Literary Lion is like that of the Spinning Plate Man who used to captivate me from time to time on The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV venues. 

Maybe you’ve seen this act, or some version of it: A guy sets dinner plates to spinning on willow rods mounted on a table. Just as he gets them all going, one of the plates loses momentum and starts to wobble, so he has to run over and rev it up again by wiggling the rod. By the time he does that, another plate is about to fall. He dashes hither and yon, frantic to keep all the plates a-spin.

The Payoff, the ultimate satisfaction of our intolerable suspense, is when a plate shatters on the stage floor. Even then, Our Hero is not licked. He takes out a fresh plate and gets it started just before zooming to the far end of the table to keep another from falling. He is the poster boy for dogged perseverance in the face of momentous odds.

And so is the serious writer. 

You must always be working on your new first draft. But you must also critique somebody else’s work; you must post your blog; you must polish a one-page synopsis to summarize your whole book for marketing purposes; you must go to a conference; you must get feedback on your first draft and make revisions; you must go to a craft fair and sell books. 

You dash here and dash there and keep everything going at once. 

But, sometimes, a plate crashes. That’s what happened at this address last week, Dear Reader. 

I failed to post a new blog, so you saw the same post two weeks in a row. 

Here is my mea culpa: I had a medical event the week before. 

On Thursday afternoon, March 19, while working on Major Important Literary Things, I was suddenly swamped by dizziness, lost consciousness, and fell from my chair to the floor. 

Aside from a goose egg on my forehead, I was unharmed. But Google told me to go to the Emergency Room, so I went. They did an EKG, a CAT scan, some stat blood work, and the usual neurological tests but found nothing amiss. 

That in itself was unsettling. Something must have caused this event. So they scheduled some followup tests.

As a result, my life these days is punctuated with trips to high-class medical facilities for different kinds of cardiac monitoring. Also, my wife or a friend must chauffeur me everywhere—because, what if the same thing happened again, while I was driving? 

The results trickle in, day by day, and pool around my feet. Yet so far, no doctor has put them together into a specific diagnosis. That kind of gnosis is hoped for in the near future.

MEANWHILE, Gentle Reader, life goes on. I heard from my highly-trusted advisor, the stellar Christine DeSmet, that she likes my new first draft (working title: Hard Feelings). It’s good that she agrees with me about that. I had hoped she would. It means there are only half a million small improvements that need to be made. You should see it in print in a year or two.

And here, somewhat late, is a new post—flogging this lame excuse, which is all I’ve got in my bag right now. I’ll try to have something better next week, Fair Reader. 

Meanwhile, prayers and all good wishes gratefully accepted.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer