If you love Steve Martin as much as I do, you are familiar with this line from the movie, Roxanne. In it, the Cyrano De Bergerac-esque character, played by Steve Martin, helps the buff but bubble-brained firefighter woo the beautiful Roxanne by feeding him lines from beneath her balcony.

The line is “I’m afraid of words.” But the firefighter misinterprets it to be “I’m afraid of worms, Roxanne, worms.”

Anyway, Roxanne eventually realizes she loves Steve Martin, huge schnozzola and all, because he speaks to her heart through his words.

This movie and this line speak to me. Like Roxanne, I am in love with words. I play with them, sleep with them, eat with them, work with them, speak, type, and write them. I play games with them, text with them, listen to them on TV and the radio in my car, fill in tiny squares with them on my crosswords, and then dream about them at night.

The dreaming is the worst. I would like a respite from words at night; really, I would. But, nay, nay. I close my eyes and start dreaming about some ridiculous book I’m supposedly writing that has boats and jeopardy and foreign-ness in it. And always children. What’s with that?

When I wake up, which I inevitably do multiple times a night because I am old, I can’t tell my dream from reality and continue trying to work through impossible plot problems and dialogue issues that are, well…crazy pants.

So, here I sit, weeks late on writing this blog because I can’t tear myself away from my current writing project long enough to say anything meaningful to you. I finally decided I would just tell you about the “Worms, Roxanne, Worms” in my head night and day.

And also about a new project that involves an old project, a woman in jeopardy, an ex-Navy pilot, a request for a full manuscript, and an upcoming writer’s workshop in Wisconsin.

More about that when I can wrestle some words into submission.