I’m writing from a writer’s worst nightmare.

My laptop crashed.

The tragedy occurred late last night. I was working overtime, poring over the latest draft of my next novel because the day had gotten away from me.

I do my best work early. There's a silent, golden window that opens around five every morning. I should’ve known better. Fellow Arkansas crime novelist Kelly J. Ford tried to warn me. Years ago, she said, “Do not hurry. Do not rest.”

I’ve got that last part down pat. I don’t idle well. I can run on five, maybe six hours of sleep. No problem.

Maybe my laptop just couldn’t keep up. Maybe that’s why, around midnight, these wavy horizontal lines appeared across the screen. I kept working. I plugged my Mac into a monitor and ploughed ahead.

Ten minutes later, the wavy horizontal lines turned into solid vertical ones. My screen froze. I grabbed my phone. I asked it what I should do. A video of a bald man with a lisp appeared. His first bit of advice was classic: “Have you tried restarting your computer?”

I hadn’t.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d powered my laptop down. The lines disappeared, and another bald man appeared, his bearded face framed in the black mirror.

It was strange, seeing myself like that. Realizing how many hours I spend every day in that exact same position, while my children’s feet thud the floorboards overhead, or my wife lies curled with a book, waiting for her husband to do what he finally did and come to bed.

Before I made it, though, I received a text from Johnny Wink. Yes. You heard it here first, folks. The last slabless (a “slab” being Winkese for “phone”) American has now joined the masses. My beloved professor makes calls. He can even text, as evidenced by the curious message I received last night:

“She do indeed. She once petted a giraffe in a zoo in Beijing.”

Johnny’s words made me smile, just like they did almost twenty years ago when I took his “Intro to Creative Writing" course.” That's when I fell, head over heels, in love with the idea of being a writer, a man who made a living out of words.

In the same way some men employ their brushes, their plungers, their sledgehammers or scalpels, so I would employ my pen, my mind.

And now that I have, I’m confronted with a new challenge, a balancing act, no different than any other professional, I presume. But what do I know? It’s just me down here, navel gazing my days — and nights — away.

My bed is warm when I slip into it and set my alarm for five, just like always.