Seventy percent of the individuals accosted by an aneurysm bursting within their head will slip into a coma and then pass away that particular day, without realizing what has burst within them.  As I got ready for a full day of writing fiction on Tuesday, March 27th this spring, I felt an odd sensation within the frontal left of my head.  I told myself that it'd be wise to sit down for safety.  Roughly an hour later, I found myself lying on the floor and unable to get up and walk at that moment.  I crawled across a small room until I could grab a phone.  Having called an ambulance, I then waited, still aware but feeling odd and vulnerable.

By the end of that day, I'd been delivered to a highly credentialed and enormously gifted neurosurgeon in Atlanta.  Fortunately, he turned attention toward surgery and advised my wife and family that I seemed to be within the thirty percent standing a better chance of getting through alive.

I spent two weeks in intensive care, recovering well.  The most important part of recovery involved my own awareness of my ability still to write.  The pieces of characters began coming together within the context of the story I had been ready to begin on March 27th.  They began coming together within the friendly home of my head, a head seemingly repaired.

It normally takes a year for full recovery after delicate surgery such as this.  I seem to have progressed at a faster pace than that, according to comments from the surgeon.  Now I can sit and continue the creative work I had planned for March 27th...and for other days.  I can focus as sharply as ever on the drudgery involved in the art and craft of writing fiction, concentrating on keeping that fiction alive and well.

Each and every day when the writer is able to take on another blank page, or set of blank pages in any way, is a gift...appreciated more than ever.

Indie writers, myself, particularly, since I also run an Indie micro-press, can easily get tangled up in the differences between trad-published writers and us. Because we are still fighting so hard for credibility and to wave away the stench of self-published from our books, we can tend to spend too much time focusing on the manner or way that we become published.

I’m an indie filmmaker as well as an indie author. I remember waiting at the orthodontist’s office with my middle schooler and listening to him refer to me to the receptionist as his Mom, “the geek.” It totally surprised me that he would see me that way, but when I really thought about it, it was a correct assessment. As a film editor, I spend a lot of time with the technology to get the project I’m working on to turn out the way I want. I am always on the lookout for the latest software to help me do my job and, of course, I’m constantly updating and refreshing my existing tools. Fact is, because I consider myself an artist, I never saw that I’m also a computer geek. But spending hours on the computer and loving all the cool apps and software programs, loving learning how to get the most out of them—all of this can obfuscate the thing that really matters.

I read an article recently (in one of my geeky film editing e-zines) that was a response to a video editor’s concern that the new, cheaper version of Final Cut Pro (a video software editing program that was extremely expensive and had a big learning curve) meant that everybody would be competing with him now for jobs. The article responded to him by making the point that I think we would all do well to remember: our tools—whether as writers or video editors—are just tools.  They are not the things that matter.

It’s the story that matters.

Strip away all the technology—whether it’s a video or a book published through Smashwords—and what you have left is the story. And it is the story that lasts. The story is not platform dependent, it is not technology dependent. It is also the answer to those authors out there who are concerned that they will not be able to contribute (and therefore compete) with the new multimedia aspects of fiction coming as sure as tsunamis follow earthquakes. No worries. As much as I love them, it’s not the gizmos, the gadgets, the fads or the gimmicks. Trust me, it’s not.