Words kiss the page like eager lovers. Scenes slip as easily from your mind as silk stockings from a courtesan. Characters whisper clever and crafty dialogue in your ear as you sleep.

Ah, the delicious satisfaction of having a book in creation. When anything is possible and rejection seems as distant as economic recovery.

The truth is that all those writers out there holding onto that great American novel, the one they’ve been toting around for decades, have one commonality. They have fallen into a suspended swoon of love for the novel in perpetual creation.

Who needs ego busting rejection letters? Or for that matter, any form of criticism, even constructive. It’s terrifying, and for many, paralyzing. As long as it’s being written, it can be anything, including and especially, a bestseller.

Staying in the bubble of invention, safe and snug, is almost impossible to resist. It is a passionate seduction of imagination where you have the captive audience of yourself to believe that every word written is golden, every scene a classic and the ending never has to come.

I say to those currently held in such temptingly sweet suspension, living in the bubble, heres hoping you find the courage one day to find a sharp pin and fearless heart.