“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Ernest Hemingway

I am a writer.

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I also managed to have one book published, now out of print (and a good bit out of date).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