“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Ernest Hemingway
Some days I’m a good writer.
I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since, at least, high school. If not before.
But I don’t think I knew how to go about doing it professionally. You know, that whole business in Albuquerque and all of that.
Somewhere along my fiftieth year, I read a book that made me stop saying that I wanted to be a writer. Instead I started saying that I am a writer.
Over the years I’ve done copywriting, I worked as a speechwriter, I’ve edited a magazine. And of course the blog.
I also managed to have one book published, now out of print (and a good bit out of date).
And I self-published my play: Clean Dry Socks: Diary of a Doughboy (available on Amazon).
That novel though…
The fact is that, through Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), I’ve “finished” about six novels. I put them aside to publish the play. I’m back to one of them now and continuing to do edits.
Honestly I don’t know how authors crank out book after book.
Well to be fair, a lot of them aren’t doing it with a day job, and a couple of night jobs.
I used to tell myself that I needed a better setup, a better laptop, a better…something.
That’s not true.
What I need to do is stop talking (or blogging) about writing, and just get it done.
I have a goal to finish the first draft of that novel by the end of this year.
If I don’t make it, I’m going to pretend I never wrote that here.
I’m a writer. Even if the book never gets published.
I have a dream that someday I’ll be able to write from my beach house with a view of the ocean.
I’ll probabably need you to buy several copies of my book.
Photo by Hayden Scott on Unsplash