I’m inspecting the inside of the oven door. Yes, it really does need some attention from a single edge razor blade. You see I plan to set my fat-encrusted oven on “Self Cleaning,” a process that will require the dedication of four hours during which the house will smell not good. But before that four hour immolation of hardened bits of caramel, chicken grease, and demerara sugar occurs, I must get in there and really scrub off the most egregious masses of baked-on ooze. If I don’t, when the self-cleaning process is in motion those highly combustible bits of sugar and fat might catch fire and turn the kitchen, my antique rugs, my sweetie’s paintings, our computers, and the odd floor lamp into blackened ruin.

Hence I’m in there inspecting the inside of the oven door in preparation for the oven-cleaning event.

If you know that a writer is busy pre-cleaning the oven, on her knees, working it over with a single-edge razor blade, then you also know that the writer in question is avoiding some looming deadline. The more onerous the deadline, the cleaner the oven. It’s a law right up there next to Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics. Nothing is more satisfying than finishing a writing assignment—an article, a chapter, a commissioned essay. However the degree to which it is satisfying is exceeded only by the amount of avoidance leading up to the completion.

No writer will ever say these words: “I love writing.” No writer will even think those words. Not possible. Writing is hard, unpleasant, and highly solitary. It is a 10 out of 10 on the Virginia Woolf Scale of Literary Labor. Almost every writer I know will do almost anything to avoid, or at least stave off the actual writing process. Hence the high sheen of my oven interior.

Painters (who have a child’s profession to begin with) are simply cheap whores when it comes to consumption of their work. No one has to actually spend time considering, or consuming visual artwork. You look, and voila!—you’ve got it. They put a few objects together—much like a Lego project if you ask me—and the world goes nuts. Push some paint around a canvas and viewers are blown away with immediate admiration. Written work requires a consumer to actually sit down, spend time in the concentration-intensive act of reading, and then remember what the investment of time was all about.

With a painting, you look, and it twinkles back at you. “Look at me!” invites the painting. That’s all it takes. Pre-digital Instagram, that’s what it is.

Both writing and reading an article, a blog, or a book is like building a website using only pre-html coding. But I digress.

Before I begin walking you through some of the lesser-known realities of putting together a book—which I will do in the next installments—I figured I had better get some of the rants and negative stuff out of my system right off the bat. That’s what I just did.

Is all writing so difficult? so fraught with self-doubt, angst, confinement, and (I’ve got to say it) torture? Surely Virginia Woolf didn’t go through this. Did she? She had a cook, a housekeeper, and a husband whose literary work (a press) kept him nearby and always ready to assist. It helped that she didn’t need a day job, except occasional article-writing for The Atlantic, the Literary Times, Vogue (yes, she wrote book reviews for Vogue). I hope that didn’t sound bitter.

But it’s still worth asking at these excruciating writerly junctures of self-loathing and childish malingering: what would Virginia Woolf do? (to be continued…)