Hey, that's the way it goes. Sometimes you can’t get the numbers on ye olde manuscript odometer to roll over, not for love nor money. Things get in the way.
But, you know, that doesn’t get me down too much. Because distractions and obstacles are part of life, and you need to plug away regardless.
Here. This about sums up the attitude I try to adopt every morning when I get to work:
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| CHARGE!!!! |
The reason these small, everyday frustrations don’t bother me too much is that I know they’re nothing compared to the much greater obstacle I faced in the past, namely my own attitude toward writing and my lack of courage to just do it.
I can’t tell you how much time and energy I devoted to the subject of Should I Be Writing when I was in my 20s. Gah. So many, many journals filled with tremulous maundering on the question, “But what if I waste my entire adult life pursuing something I have no real aptitude for when I could have put those years to more productive use?”
Yup. That’s about the size of it. Thems the chances you take.
And then one day I decided to proceed even though, all things considered, yeah, it probably would be best if I didn’t. Because writing was what I wanted to do, and all the shoulds in the world weren’t going to change that.
Occasionally I think about what Alternative Reality Kristen is doing right now, in some other dimensional realm. That girl who overpowered her silly desire to write and got a law degree or some such thing. Maybe she’s got a closet full of power suits and terrorizes her assistant for failing to put the correct ratio of sugar to milk in her macchiato. Who knows?
Mostly, I feel sorry for her.
For this I have learned: you can live quite happily without your dreams ever coming true, but you can’t live happily without pursuing your dream at all. And if you’re going to fail, fine, but make the world say no to you, don’t say it to yourself.
You've got to be committed.
Exactly.
Like a crazy person.
What do you reckon your Alternative Reality/Non-Writer You is doing right now?
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