Kristi and I met just a few days before my 36th birthday. I was living in Winter Park, Florida, having a decent year in the business, but I was feeling a general sense of fatigue. Both professional and in my life in general. I was tired. And the one thing I decided to do with my birthday was to pack up my laptop, drive down to the corner Starbucks, park myself and try my best to write a damned short story. While I’ve started over twenty stories (and buried them in the bottom of a file cabinet) since embarking on full time writing, it’d been over five years since I actually completed one. And even of the ones I did finish in 2002, only two did I ever feel was worth a damn.

This was heavy on my mind that day for some reason; probably it was just the sense of escaping time and wondering if I’d already wasted the best opportunities life would offer me. I’d started down this long, weird road many years ago because I wanted to write fiction for a living, and business copywriting was the pragmatic stepping stone towards that goal – a practical way to pay the bills writing professionally while I worked on the longer dream. I’ve done well by it. But I never intended to be copywriting for the rest of my life.

I didn’t get a story written that day, instead sitting in front of the laptop for three hours daydreaming and reworking the same three paragraphs over and over again. I found myself increasingly more focused on the words themselves. Sentence flows. Marriage of verb and subject, action and reaction, transition and narration. And ended up wondering if basically eight years as a copywriter had ruined me for writing anything longer than 100 words.

I never in my wildest imagination could have considered on that 36th birthday that I’d just met my wife. Or that very shortly every assumption, every plan, every consideration, every ambition, every priority and every value I possessed would shortly be rocked. Or that less than two years later I’d be sitting with my lovely wife on a secluded rock shelf, feet dangling over the edge, watching otters playing in the Pacific – and reflecting on how often the big obstacles in life aren’t what they appear to be. That when you climb over and past the stone rock face that chases away the tourists, something better and rarer and more significant may lay beyond.

Anyway. In the last six months or so, since liberating my manual typewriter from Florida, I’ve felt a pull back towards those keys. It was on that typewriter I wrote and finished those short stories years ago. I’ve never had writers block on a manual typewriter – it’s always been the ideal creative instrument for me. The problem is, it makes noise and drives the pets and the lovely wife insane, so I can’t do anything with it in the house. Over these recent months, my mind has drawn more and more frequently to the garage.

After making damned sure that Kristi didn’t mind, I set up shop last week, with a makeshift desk (made from wooden planks laid over Sam’s dog crate) and some cobbled bric-a-brac and a swivel chair stolen from the office. And so lately I’ve been sneaking away to this little studio when I need to unplug for a bit and just be creative, without the impulse to check email or worry about the monthly billables or be focused on this marketing campaign or that month’s email newsletter project.

I’m just very grateful to have such an understanding wife. I know she doesn’t really get why a manual typewriter has the pull it does on me (“Why don’t you just write with a quill pen and an inkwell?”) but she’s content to indulge me.

At least most of the time. She does get annoyed when I’m out editing a manuscript when I’m supposed to be helping with the laundry.

The studio: