B.K. Crawford

Clutter! I have a bottle of ink and a quill pen always in front of me. There's a little statuette of an angel staring at me (she claims she's my muse). A stack of poker chips that I fan when I'm playing cards online. A hot cup of tea to my left, a glass of ice water to the right, and trinkets galore cluttered beneath my monitor. The trinkets include: marbles that mesmerize me, an ancient scarab beetle encased in clear amber, my flash drives, the thingamabob you use to wipe your monitor when it gets a smudge, some business cards, a white porcelain elephant with its trunk raised, a case for my reading glasses, a small fan attached to my USB, a timer, some stones from the beach, and several very pretty gem stones. Last, but not least, there's a bright window behind the monitor that allows me to watch the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks that come to play in the bird bath.

Yes, I do, and what a mangled mess. I switched point of view in the middle of a paragraph, changed topics without warning, and ended up with a garbled rag that even I didn't understand. It was truly awful. I gained a whole new appreciation for professional writers through that experience. Since then, I've learned there's no better way to master the craft than to write persistently and learn from the mistakes you make along the way. The more you write, the more you learn, the better you get.