See, stew, sit, and...there it is.

I was driving home this morning as the sun came up. The sky was orange at the horizon and changed miraculously to a band of deep blue, lightening to a pale blue glow that would minutes later, become azure with the full light of day. Clouds were vertical jags with edges growing dull with time.

I didn't plan to write about the sky, here or in any of the Sexton books. I probably will, but by then I won't remember that sunrise in particular. It was part of what I'll call my "see".

It will go into the sludge of stuff in my brain, along with conversations and observations, jokes, hopes, and pieces of cranial lint that's already there. When it comes up in the course of whatever portion of whichever book, I won't remember it.

That's how the writing process, the external part of it anyway, works for me. It doesn't matter if it's a character description, a place, a piece of dialog, or a joke. I don't mean to imply that writing isn't work for me. It is.

The best stuff that comes out is the stuff I don't think I had to think about, but stuff I did think about when I didn't think I was thinking.

If you understand the previous sentence...you're probably a writer or some other kind of artist.