This week, I wrote a short story. It isn’t just any short story. It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve completed in over four years.

The words “four years” leave me breathless. In that I nearly passed out when I first realized it had been that long. I started writing fiction about thirty-five years ago. This was by far the longest I’d gone without finishing a novel or short story.

Reader, during most of the past two and a half years–when my inability to do anything but revise work I’d begun ...