One of the episodes that I caught up on today was about authors taking their job seriously. Kevin J. Anderson was a guest on the show, and I tell you what, that man works hard at being a writer.
And that's coming from me. Someone who logs 60-80 hours per week at the restaurant I work at.
And I think he works hard. That should tell you something.
Anyway, it hit me. Writing is what I want to do. But have I really acted as though it were as important as I purported it to be?
It got me thinking. I work a lot. I have a lot of reasons to justify not getting my writing done. After 13+ hours on my feet it's easy to just kick back and watch TV when I get home. It's even easy to say that I really am working on my writing, because there are some very good movies and shows that I can learn a lot from as a writer.
And maybe if I listen to audio books while I sleep I will learn through osmosis.
Yeah, so I realized that I'm fairly easily distracted. One of the traps that I fall into is that when I think of getting to work writing I imagine that I need at least a couple of hours of uninterrupted time to really dig in. So if everything is not perfect, it's all too easy for me just to blow it off and wait for another time when conditions will be better.
The problem is, of course, that conditions are rarely if ever better.
So, asking myself, how seriously do I take my craft? I thought that I was taking it seriously, but when I've gone back over the past weeks and mapped how many hours I actually spent writing I saw that the answer wasn't what I wanted it to be.
However, I still want to take it seriously. So now the hard part. Putting my money where my mouth is. I can give myself incentives and set goals all that I want, but without results it doesn't mean a thing.
That doesn't mean that I can't still have fun with it. I mean, that's the beauty of it all. It's work, true, but it's work that I love doing.
So, that's it. I've got work to do. Best be getting to it. Meanwhile, here's a picture I drew last night.
