Chris roamed around the apartment and finally settled under a low-hanging bulb in the recently vacated college kid’s room at 2 am.

It was chilly in there.

He thought of turning on the radiator but didn’t think he’d be there for two full hours and reasoned it would grow too hot as it sometimes does.

When he slid back under the covers his feet were icy. Had he not noticed?

“I was thinking about my book,” he said.

He’s been illustrating “A Song about Myself,” by John Keats, and is in the murky middle, not sure if there’s any “there, there.”

“I’ve painted so many pages and only today did it begin to feel alive,” he'd said during the day, but then at night his subconscious tricked him into believing those living pages were actually dead pages. “I think I’m using the wrong approach,” he said.

It surprises him (and me) how hard it is to find that spark in each project, even, in his case, when the dummy is in and approved, and it’s just a matter of doing the final work.

Yet his struggle is any artist or writer's struggle, it's certainly been my struggle, and it helps me knowing it's just how it is: One day the art looks lovely, the text reads beautifully; the next day it's awful.

One has to believe that learning is happening in the process, even in the failed or half-baked projects. Imperceptibly, skills expand, like snowballs rolled in perfectly sticky snow.

Eventually, it’s bound to come alive, right?