Tag: you don’t need to be published to be a writer

“Money for Nothing”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Starting Monday, I’m off from work for two weeks.  So it’s understandable that when I complained about how much I have to get done before my husband and I leave for vacation on Thursday, his response was, “Relax, you’re on vacation.”

To which I replied, “Are you kidding?”

Because while I might be off from Job #1, the job that pays the bills and the health insurance and the mortgage, there’s still Job #2 to think about.  That’s the job that doesn’t earn me any money – yet.  It’s the job I wake up at 6 am every morning for.  The one I do at nights, and on weekends.  The one I am hoping to make into a full-time, paid position.

No, I don’t intern.  I’m a writer.

Writing doesn’t mean I sit down at the computer and type for a few hours and have something magical to share with the rest of the world.  It’s not something I do in my spare time, like knitting or baking.  It is emphatically not a “jobby.”  It is a profession.  A career.  A job.

It hasn’t always been.  For years I fiddled.  Dabbled.  Wrote a few lines here and there.  Did NaNo for a year, then didn’t write anything else for the next twelve months.  It’s different now.  For me, the key is this:

I sit down and write even when I don’t want to.  I sit down and write when I’ve been up late the night before and want to sleep in an extra hour.  I sit down and write when I’ve worked an 80 hour week and want to do nothing more than veg on the couch and watch Gossip Girl.

I’ll leave you with this.

Wings & Glitter

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts1 Comment

I go from day to day.  I know where the cupboards are.  I know where the car is parked.  I know he isn’t you.

Tori show last night, the first one I’ve seen since Florida.  I knew she’d be in New York, but wasn’t planning to go.  That part of my life feels long since over, the Florida show I went to with Liz six years ago one last grasp at adolescence.  The theatre released a block of tickets Monday morning, though, and I logged onto Ticketmaster for the hell of it and ended up with a seat five rows from the stage.

The show was epic.  Instead of the band she had a string quartet, and those boys played like they’d bought their instruments from the devil himself.  I sat next to a little fae boy, who had been to the same show at Great Woods in ’99 that I’d been at, and who confessed that he missed seeing all the teenage girls in their wings and their glitter.

We’ve grown up, I told him, put aside the wings in favor of careers and husbands.

I am finding myself, more and more, feeling as though perhaps I made a left turn when I should have gone write.  My husband told me he thought of my writing as a hobby.  I tried to explain it was more, that I need words the way most people need oxygen.  As so often happens when I speak, though, I got it wrong, and the upshot of the conversation was that the student loans get paid off and then we can think about leaving the city.

It frustrates me to be unable to explain why writing is unlike, say, gardening or model aircraft building, but he has something of a point.  I write in my free time, in the extra hour I have when I leave work before 9 pm or on the weekends when he is working.  I write on vacations, and in the odd spaces, but only when I have time for it.  It’s hard to justify switching to something as a career – especially something with no guarantee of earning you a living – when you don’t treat it as such.  And so, instead of spending my Sunday night relaxing on the couch watching TV, I edited.