Critique_This_WIP

For me, writing is a forced hobby due to the reality of life and I find it both joyful and sad. It is joyful because my spare time is spent doing something I love. It is sad because I have to put the keyboard away and move on to the things that pay the bills. It is also sad because writing doesn’t burn calories and it isn’t easy to write on a treadmill.

My real life job is demanding and full of pressure and problems and I never know from one day to the next whether I’ll be working an eight hour day, or an eighteen hour day. This is the nature of my reality beast.

So for my blog posts, I have to be organized. I have to plan ahead. I have to be anal about getting things done early because I know my life will get in the way if I don’t.

Well, I failed this week. I wanted to post something witty, crafty or inspiring today. But I had my head in the clouds last week and buried in work this week and my post crept up on me today and hit me over the head and is now laughing at me hysterically. Now my hobby slash life dream has become an albatross and it is squeezing my neck and taking my oxygen and sucking out my life force.

Procrastination and real life got in my way today I’m not feeling the joy of writing.

So, instead of putting out some thoughtful reflections on writing techniques or some food for thought on how to inspire, how to organize, how to characterize, how to plot or not plot, or talking about muses or sharing music to write to…all of the things that help and prod and let us all feel we’re in the same boat and encourage us to keep going…I’m just ranting, complaining, suffocating and most of all apologizing.

I’m so sorry.

And I’ll leave it at that except to share a few writing quotes I found and I must say they brought a smile to my face on this day of self-loathing (courtesy of http://www.quotegarden.com/writing.html).

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Graycie Harmon

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie Finding Forrester

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~André Gide, Journals, 1894

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. ~Robert Benchley