I am a Professional Writer

*Snort*

So my life took some strange turns in this past year and I ended up here. I felt like I was wasting my life being a part time library assistant. I liked my job but it was far from satisfying. I worked with some really amazing people and had some interesting experiences but I knew I couldn’t do that for much longer. I escaped for school but I knew my plans for going back to school for computer training were not really what I wanted and fate stepped in on me there. I ended up doing nothing. Doing nothing is not good for me. I am not happy with nothing. Other people are not happy with me doing nothing and they let me know. I started this blog and told people I would keep up with it. (Yes, someone pointed out to me that I come up with good ideas all the time that I never follow through with. I am half way through month three and still going with it.)

I realized that I was really happy writing. I have been told since fourth grade that I need to be a writer but for some reason it never sunk in. I think its because it is one of those things that people always say they want to do but reality always sinks in so I had subconsciously decided to skip the ‘working for the dream part’ and went straight to the ‘giving up and trying for something more realistic’ part. Also, writing never seemed hard for me or like I was doing anything particularly special even though my entire life people had encouraged me. In short, I was to stubborn to listen to other people and too lacking on confidence to give it a go.

Month one of thematic experiment changed that. I realized people read my stuff and not just because they felt the need to out of loyalty, but because they enjoyed it. Since then I realized I wanted to be a professional writer when I grow up. Now I write almost daily on this site with either this blog or my WoW blog and I have even started a book.

Now here comes the resolution part:

I have always been too intimidated to start a book because I never felt like I had plot or sufficient ideas to write a good book. By the way, I do see how dumb this thought process is and if someone had told me they weren’t doing something they wanted to do because they didn’t think they would be good at it I would bop them over the head. Anyway, I solved this by deciding to write a not good book. I am not planning to write utter crap but I am setting to write a decent science fiction novel with a romantic subplot.  I am not expecting to turn out world changing sci-fi, more like literary junk food. I think I can handle that.

Now if I were going to make a crazy resolution it would be to write eight hours a day, five days a week like I was a real grown up writer with a real grown up writing job. This will NEVER happen. My brain wanders way too much and after an hour of writing I have to take spazz out breaks. I barely make it through one of these posts without opening another browser tab and surfing the net for a few minutes. Okay, so I do open another tab and surf the internet for a bit quite often while writing these.  After an hour and a half of writing my brain lulls so thoroughly that I feel the need to nap. I resist (most of the time) but I can’t see myself sitting here for eight straight hours churning out the great next American sci-fi junk food. Not happening.

So I need to come up with something more reasonable that takes my goldfish-like attention span into account. Maybe I should schedule in two two-hour blocks of writing broken up by errands, exercise, WoW, or other things. I think I could handle two hours of writing at a time and maybe I would actually get something written.  If I am not careful I am going to end up drawing up a schedule. Maybe I should ask Angela about how to do that whole being organized and having a schedule thing.