I bet you were starting to worry, thinking “I don’t know if Kitty is going to do it today, it’s almost midnight!” First of all, my hard time limit would probably be dawn, because the day changing over at night has always seemed awkward to me. A new day happens when the sun comes up. When the street lamps gutter another night is over!
Regardless I will be done before midnight anyway.
I start this during my lunch break from work. Going back to work this week while also doing physical therapy has made this damn near impossible. I was an hour late for work today, because of PT this morning, which means I should stay late tonight. But I’m not going to. I don’t have any more appointments this week, so that is good I guess. I hate having to cut back on PT in order to manage working, but I guess life is about choices and I can’t risk losing my job right now.
I have something I want to do tonight. A few friends of mine is moving out of town and I want to go say “bye” to them. I will need to leave my house as soon as I get off work, do that and then come back and do some more writing before bed probably.
Today’s topic in the book is “are we having fun yet?”
Sometimes I have fun writing, sometimes I don’t. Often it has less to do with the writing itself than it does with worrying about the things I am not doing while I write, or with the self-esteem issues of feeling like no one is ever going to read it. Sometimes things like writer’s block or stress over a deadline, or even worse a rejection can make writing not fun. But I disagree with something the author says on page 146 “I know some people say that it’s always grueling and it’s more about getting to the finish line and having written but I don’t tend to agree with that. Who would say that about any other pursuit or job choice? You have to enjoy the process too”
I will admit I haven’t looked into the life of the author much, but that sounds like it is coming from a place of privilege. I think pretty much everyone says that about pretty much all jobs. Do you think I “enjoy” my other jobs? Do I get a great sense of joy or purpose from doing phone tech support or leading teams of people to do phone tech support, or listening to calls of people talking to phone sales and grading them? No, no I don’t. I enjoy job 2 (phone sex) sometimes, much like I enjoy writing sometimes. I’m happy when I have a good caller, and I get to do lots of storytelling and be creative. But with both jobs 1 and 2, I can’t just walk away when I stop enjoying the process. I can’t just hang up on a caller because I’m bored, I can’t just look at either of my other jobs and say “well, that’s not working for me emotionally, so I think I’ll do something else” and run into a field full of flowers.
I would love to have the money to quit job 1, only do job 2 when I feel like it and focus on writing. But I don’t live in that world. I have to pay bills. Almost all jobs require you to do things you don’t want to do.
It would take years of hard work to get to a place where I could make enough money to live as a writer. Writing is difficult, it takes lots of time to get good at it. There are skills to learn, books I need to read and podcasts I have to listen to. I have to do more networking, and more submitting. I have to pay money out of my own pocket for editing. I keep working on this because I like writing and I like the future me I see as a writer. I like that dream. I’m not ready to give up on the dream and just do corporate business world jobs. Maybe someday I’ll give up on this, go back to my accounting career path. I could be making way, way more money as an account than I do with my current job, but I like the freedom of a low responsibility work from home job. I like that I can still work on my dream in the time I would have been commuting, drinking after work with co-workers and dealing with clients.
There aren’t any specific exercises to do today, so I guess I’ll work on those poems more.
I started another poem during lunch and worked on it during my 15-minute break too. I think this one is going to probably be the best. I wish I could post part of it here, but since it’s for a submission I can’t.
Once lunch break was over I did more day job stuff for several more hours. The moment work was over I changed clothes and jumped in the car so I could attend to a “going away” party.
A super awesome person I know is moving from Atlanta to the west coast to go to school and I needed to tell her “bye” before she leaves tomorrow. I was feeling a little guilty about going out and having fun when I should be writing or cleaning or working on important busy work things. However, I had a talk with myself about what the real meaning of life is. The ultimate goal is to be happy and seeing my friends makes me happy. However coming home I did notice that my house smells a little off, so I think one of the other meanings of life is to clean my damn nasty kitchen tomorrow.
Total writing time today was 1 hour 27 minutes. Tomorrow I will try to do more, like at least 2 hours to make up for the short writing days recently.
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