"Do you know where the gas tank to the Johnson is?" my husband Steve asked through the static of our cell phones. "I took it out of the garage when we were getting ready for Elly's graduation party," he reminded me somewhat pointedly, "and now I can't find it."

Here I am, 300 miles from home, attending my second writer's workshop at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Steve calls to ask if I know where he put the gas tank to the 1956 Johnson outboard motor?

And this isn't the first phone call I've received from him this week asking where something was. Earlier he wanted to know if we had any more instant coffee.

Yes, I did ask Steve to get the motor out of the garage for our daughter's high school graduation party several weeks ago, and yes, he does need to find it and tune it up before hauling it to Rice Lake, Ontario, for our family's biennial fishing trip later this month.

Always looking for ways to save money, Steve bought the 10-horsepower Johnson after our last trip to Rice Lake in 2005. (He found it in a Butler Eagle classified.) This year, he plans to use it on a rental boat, even though he's never tested its ability to run in water.

"Johnsons are good motors," he tells me whenever I worry about its reliability, dismissing my concern that it's almost as old as we are, and we don't always run so well anymore.

During last week's writing conference, attended by about 60 wannabe writers, I attended hour-long presentations ranging from writing scene and dialogue to developing a story arc.

For several years now, I have become increasingly interested in writing again. A former high school English teacher, I, too, have dreamt of writing that great American novel. And now that my children are moving on to lives of their own — our youngest graduated from high school this spring, thus the cleaned-out garage and the missing gas tank — I am finding more time to pursue my own interests.

Through the years, though, my skills have grown rusty, and the writing workshops have helped me hone them and reconnect with others interested in writing. (Where else can you find people cracking jokes about adjectives, and the audience loving it: "You could tell Hemingway was really excited when he wrote this," explained one of the presenters, "because he started using adjectives.")

Steve's phone call about the gas tank came just as I had emerged from a writing session titled "Working 9 to 5, Writing When?" In it, a panel of four published authors talked about the importance of carving out time from your daily responsibilities to write.

"If you're going to be a writer, you have to be ruthless about demanding your own time," advised Elizabeth Strout, author of the New York Times best-seller "Isabelle and Ann."

"People don't think writing is real work, so they never think anything of interrupting what you're doing," she concluded.

I can tell that my newfound writing life is going to be an uphill battle; I'll bet Strout's husband never called her looking for a gas tank.

Linda K. Schmitmeyer is a freelance writer living in Middlesex Township. Her e-mail address is lks260@zoominternet.net.