I have been asked about my writing process. Process is terribly important; anyone who dares put ink to paper or pixel to screen must have one. 

My current process is to seat myself at my rolltop desk, which I wanted all my life and finally got in my seventh decade, and pretend I am going to write, but actually just twiddle thumbs until I get up and wash the bathroom floor. 

But here’s the way mine used to go when I was not retired. 

It begins in the morning with leaving the house in time to see, half a block away, the bus pull out of the stop. The next bus comes really really close to catching the ferry to Manhattan, but the terminal doors shut before we have crossed from the bus to the station.

Reaching Manhattan, if there’s actually a Citibike in the dock next to the ferry, I’ll take that—if it’s not one of those just placed there to taunt us, like Orlando Bloom, who exists but not in any way approachable by us.

The bike path in the park has been taken over by that gray-haired guy with a ponytail, who bicycles the way Floridians drive, wandering randomly upon the lane at about half my 8 mph speed, so I can’t get ahead or around him. 

The commuting clock is ticking.

When I go to dock my bike, my bag strap has been seized with an all-consuming passion for the docking mechanism and has complexly welded with the machinery; the dock in response is clutching the strap, never to release it. I take the strap off the bag and leave strap and dock in a passionate yet tragically futile embrace, a love that will go down in history as did that of Dido and Aeneas.

I cross under West Street through the remains of Moby Dick, against the flow of commuters coming into Manhattan in a great important hurry who cannot be bothered to not run into a dumpy middle-aged woman going the opposite direction. If they even see me, which I honestly doubt.

Aggravated as heck, I go grumbling into the job, but since that staff meeting, no one chit-chats with me, so I write some witty and pithy comments on the failure of any administration to take account of bicycles/middle-aged women/Citibikes in their infrastructure planning, just to get it off my chest.

Throughout the workday, between proofreading insurance documents, I try to decipher what I had heatedly typed in the morning: “adntehn l glaready aleinaated everyone theeres by a n unfoautranteoubturst.”

I write something else entirely.

Late at night, after a few beers, I send what I have written to The New Yorker before I properly edit it. Five days later, I try The New York Times. A week later, I submit the piece, now pretty out of date, to the Daily News, hoping the editor did not recognize me under my Twitter handle when I sent that late-night tweet. About his wife.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, I learn that a classmate/classmate’s child/classmate’s nephew is a playwright/biographer/world-famous critic, or publishing in The New Yorker (her dad and I threw garbage at each other working kitchen duty) or in The New York Times—where the essay made the front of the Week in Review section and the most shared list. I’m sure you read it: the waiter for rich people who was giving it up? Yeah, that one.

I feel really old. I give up and put the piece on my blog.

And that’s my writing process. I hope it has been inspirational to you.