When we talked yesterday about your writing–about the list of books in your mind, the list you went down without any effort, the list that included chapter outlines, themes, and topics in you like blood–I hope you heard me despite my firm and sometimes spicy presentation.  I hope you heard in my words the evidence that there are people waiting for you to get the work done.  I hope you heard, in me, the readers who would not only be open to your book(s) but who would be excited about it.  Interested in it.  Generous with it.

I hope you never lose the sense that you are not done until you are faithful to the conviction you told me about, that long strand of material sitting in you and expecting to be given to readers of your printed words, listeners to your spoken words.  I hope you are upset in an essential way until you respond.

I hope you connect your head, your heart, and your hands, and that the work of your hands proves to you that it’s about those accepting your work with gladness as much as it is about you completing something so internal to you.  I hope you realize that whatever has stalled you has stalled those of us who will read your stuff.

I hope you get through your resistance, your fears, however real they are.  I hope that you write and that you publish and that we can laugh about how hard I came at you even though I really didn’t have the right to say what I said.  I hope I was speaking out of my own reactions to the welled up, stored up, waiting up work in you but also for the audience that is expecting.