Superstitious

I've always been told baseball players are superstitious.  They would wear the same pair of socks during a winning streak or putting their pants on left leg first then right.  Silly superstitious ball players.

I would never do anything that silly.  Okay, sure I never sscratch an itch on my right palm because that is the hand you get money with and I always scratch the left palm because that is the hand you give money with.  And I might try to get everything to equal my lucky number 13.  Like my first car's license plate was ABNB 652 (6+5+2=13) but then driving home 22 hours after buying it and an ice storm I put it on its roof so I guess it wasn't that lucky.  But I didn't get hurt so that is.  Ha!  When I say I found any way to make things equal 13 I found the way.  Say your phone number was 942-2945 in the 338 area code I would sit there going through the math until coming up with 3+3+8+9+4+2-9-4-5=13 Tada!

Oh damn, I am superstitious.

Its not my fault.  A lot of writers are superstitious.  Some need to write in the same place, same music playing, wearing a certain hat, etc.  It is all a trick of the mind.  Your brain gets it that you need a Staedtler triplus ball M pen in order to get the same mojo as you had to write your first book in order to write the second.  In a recent writers block stint I thought about what I would have given to be working an evening pizza shift at the Urban Eatery in Charlottetown leaning against the door with my notebook and pen.  The smell of tomato sauce, the heat from the 650 degree brick oven, ahhh.

For a while there I named all of the main character's girlfriends with a name starting with the letter C.  Courtney, Catherine, Casey.  In Red Island Reid's wife is Hillary so no C, but it is a rocky marriage so I guess that makes up for it.  On the other side I always wanted to name a main chracter Clay.  Any story I started witha  Clay never got finished so in my head now it will never get finished.

I also prefer to write either with pen and notebook or with the very same computer which has crashed, been erased, and now has a faulty plug.  When I was looking for an agent I sent out my query 13 times before going Indie.

The trouble with superstitions is that they are in your head.  Your head controls what happens.  Like if you think you can't finish a story when you switch to a Bic pen, you won't.  I'm sure almsot every writer has some sort of superstition.  We are only human after all.