The Balancing Act Of The Aspiring Writer

Just some thoughts I had one day about my journey (so far)...

* You can’t quit your day job (yet) so you have to find free time to write.
* Sometimes free time is not possible so you make do with those few minutes you do get to jot down a scene idea, dialogue line, or plot twist.
* You hit a roadblock since you have no free time to write that you go online reading other blogs about becoming a writer (when logically you could be WRITING instead).
* You discover a new TV series while filling up your cart on Amazon with bargain books one day, and in turn, you become obsessed with said TV series and watch it religiously in marathon style in between the times you work and sleep.
* You signed up for the 2011 Goodreads Reading Challenge and after you sense you will bypass your initial goal, you raise it from 50 to 75, and then you find yourself in the middle of September with 100 days left to finish 25 books.
* After having your work schedule changed to meet the needs of people with less seniority than yourself, your sleep pattern gets thrown off so that you can’t get a good nights rest, and you find yourself up too late on nights you need to get up early, or you’re still up at 1:16 AM writing this article out when you CAN sleep in, only to sleep in until 11:30 the next day and throw off your schedule more.
* Due to your horrible sleep patterns and work schedule, you eat late or too early every day, which messes up your daily routine even more.
* You buy boatloads of writing books, dictionaries, and thesauruses, only to find you have no time to read or use them. Then you find your writing keeps lacking that spark with your inability to get that word off the tip of your tongue and into your story.
* You really need to gather up all the items unsold at your garage sale and put them up for sale online, but you decided to do NaNoWriMo this year, and then the new girl at work quits and you find yourself having to work alternating 4 and 5 day work weeks all of November, which leaves you no time to set up items for sale or even go to the post office to ship.
* You appear unsociable to your friends and family when you spend most of your free time writing, blogging, or online in general, and so you spend time with them instead of writing and you’re still stuck on the first 10,000 words of your novel since you can’t stop editing and changing things.
* You spend more than half an hour of your time typing out this article on your laptop while listening to the Twilight Soundtrack since you haven’t listened to it in awhile and find yourself getting distracted hearing those songs you almost forgot about since you haven’t even watched the movie in months.

~Jessica