Never a dull moment

Nothing like teaching to remind you why writing is respite. To have time to sit down, tune in and tune out--bliss. And in short supply once the gale of email hits full-force again.
Maybe we novelists should've been born two centuries ago, when all you needed to deal with was paper and a quill pen and ink. No phones. No emails. Not even a manual typewriter, never mind electric.
It's kind of astonishing, actually, that anybody writes anything longer these days than a two-line note. (No texting during class, I tell my students, and keep your laptop closed.)
Sigh.
There's something sooo romantic about the thought of being shut away in a clean uncluttered room with nothing more than the action in one's head and a good sharp pencil and a pad of lined paper.
Okay, bring on the Bronte fantasies--I can ignore the dark, sad parts of the spinsterly sisters' lives. The spartan, freezing Haworth parsonage, their tiny closeted lives. The hunger pains, the grimness.
What I see are stories, messsages, on the wings of ravens flying around the churchyard there, lighting on the tombstones.
It's rainy and grey, and there's a funeral going on in the church for some miserly misfit.
And our collective inner Charlotte/Emily/Ann is peering ecstatically out the window, scribbling away like a maniac.
This writer-familiar doesn't notice that her fingers are blue or that the rain is turning to sleet and her hair the same colour.
Nobody knocks. Nobody calls.
The ravens dictate.
She writes into the long bitter evening; writes until the candle burns to nothing; writes until there's nothing left but dark, then writes her way to dawn. When a sparrow arrives to perch on the windowsill, and so assured, our W-F dips her pen again, and carries on.