I recently listened to the Were You Raised by Wolves Podcast. It’s a fun and witty perspective on manners, and never more needed than in today’s culture. An episode on baggage claim etiquette pricked my ears. I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Many a carousel I’ve stood by hoping my unwieldy old black Samsonite will be the next to drop from the chute, safe and sound. I’m ready to be on my way. Noodling on how our writerly baggage keeps we authors from moving ahead on our journeys, I found a takeaway.

If we don’t pick up our work and do something with it, it’s going to sit there losing its momentum, its all-important sense of urgency until the cosmic belt stops. First we need to CLAIM it, then screw up the temerity to polish it, rewrite it, publish it, query it, blog about it. (Or maybe jettison it if it wasn’t worth its weight to begin with. And stop fretting about it.) Otherwise, someone else is going to come along and snare it. Hopefully not literally–get out of town plagiarists!–but as there’s nothing new under the sun, someone else is going to come up with a riff on your idea and end up a best seller.

Lolling about in first class with free drinks.