The glamorous life of a writer

[e_moon60]

Before I was published, I had pretty much the same romantic vision of the writing life that I'd had in high school and college and after, based on books and TV shows like _Murder She Wrote_ (or, more recently, _Castle_) in which a writer had a nice house or apartment, always "interesting" in its location, design, or decoration, lots of friends, and

Comments

[asher63]

Thank you for sharing this un-glamorous - yet totally awesome in its mundaneness - view of a day in the real life of a professional writer.

[e_moon60]

Thanks for enjoying it. There are days I wish for the imagined "special writers' edition" life, when I have the uninterrupted hours and can simply let the story roll, but...it's the interruptions that shoved me out into the dailyness of days that have added most to the work. When I look at the few examples of my early fiction still extant, I see the intense inward focus and the unreality of the characters and situations that results from it--all learned from reading, not from living. But I'm off schedule now and must get offline and start doing other stuff, writing and the daily routine both.

[gifted]

True words, especially the part about creativity dying if left unattended or ignored. I sometimes write music, and if I don't, or can't, drop everything and document an idea now, well.. let's just say many beautiful things go into the ether, never to be heard again. Even a documented idea can lose steam or capacity or become lost and empty if its full progression isn't brought in being while it's still fresh in the creative mind.

And then you can never fully rest until it's completed, in case some special part/s of it go/es away; it stays there in your mind, working and working (not only at the risk of being lost, somehow, but of being overworked before it goes through its natural process).

People get these notions of an artist (of whatever kind) throwing everything aside and going into their own world, but it's not so free and romantic when you're grasping not to lose a hold of this small thread of possibility forming in your mind.

[e_moon60]

That's certainly true of the creative idea/impulse: it will take over your life if you let it. I have lost stories to the need to deal with the ordinary stuff, but the ordinary stuff also connects me to other people, something writers need if they're going to write things that other people will read. (Lose stories, gain readers? I don't particularly like the thought of that, and yet

[gifted]

So true, and I guess -- like everything -- it requires balance.

[anonymous]

My kitchen floor tends to get fluffy before it gets crunchy - two long haired german shepherds - and that has to be dealt with because even vey small tumblefurs on a hard service are very slippery if you step on one. That makes it sound like I never clean, but when they are moulting they can put out a shopping bag of fur a day, add in open doors in summer so they can go out into the garden and you get tumbefurs every day. Off to sweep hair/fur (we both have long hair which doesn't help) off the carpets before vaccuming, even with a 'cat&dog'vaccum cleaner this is necessary if I want to be able to vaccum for more than a coule of minutes at a time before cleaning the hair/fur combo off the roller wheel ...

[e_moon60]

I produce a LOT of hairs (all long) that definitely clog up a vacuum cleaner roller or a sweeper roller. Now that my hair's mostly gray, it matched the mottled gray carpet perfectly and I can't *see* it. I do try sweeping in little circles to make it tangle and come up into the broom where I can yank it free and into the waste basket it goes, but...when I can't see it, it's hard to do. (Whine, whine, whine...stop it, E.)

[sheff_dogs]

I use a yard brush with stiff bristles and just do the whole floor.

I am currently trying to persuade Mr sheff_dogs that we should not replace the laminate with carpet. The laminate does have to go, it's breaking up in places and is very slippy for the dogs one of which has athritis and really doesn't want to be on slippy floors. But a hard floor with rugs would mean I could easily sweep up the tumblefur that gathers around the edges of a room. Vacuuming is always a pobleem, the older dog was kept in a shed for her first five months and at eight is still frightened by the vacuum, the younger who was taught not to growl in his first home (yes that means his only way of telling you 'no' is to snap, though he is learning to growl again)just tries to kill the vacuum and keeping him out of the room isn't always possible. Ah well it will be a while before the other work is done and we need to make the final decision.

[songblaze]

A disabled woman with thick hair down to mid-thigh with a big service labradoodle (who sheds like a lab, but it's typically 4-6" long) makes for the worst of both worlds. It's a wonder the hair around here hasn't killed someone.

By the way, for getting hair out of a rug, three possible suggestions. One is that rubbing your bare foot in circles will pull up more hair than any device. One is that a rubber squeegee is surprisingly effective. And the last is a very stiff but short-bristled broom designed for removing hair from rugs that I found on Amazon that works very well; if you are interested, I will look up which one exactly I bought, but it works much better than I expected, especially as it was about $12 if I recall correctly.

[geekmerc]

To be fair, aren't the perfect dressed up writers also supposed to be the extremely successful and overflowing with money types? I don't think _Murder She Wrote_ actually discussed it. It would have been improper at the time, I think. _Castle_ definitely implied that he had money to spare.

Even writers have their 1% that takes more money than the other 99%. Such things usually have little to do with the books themselves.

[e_moon60]

If you want to have your fictional writers do things other than write, then they need to have enough sales success or inherited wealth to make that work for readers. For escapist entertainment, the rich are a more popular topic than the poor. (This is not a slap at escapist entertainment, just a comment on the practicalities thereof. Aristotle pointed out thousands of years ago that stories about kings and princes do better in the theater than stories of the common man

[geekmerc]

Well, in this day and age, movie and merchandise rights can often eclipse book revenue. Certain types of stories adapt better than others to the screen. I was definitely going to avoid the quality argument. The market has long dictated that "quality" is variable.

[e_moon60]

I don't think of mine as particularly screenable, though I can vividly imagine them in my head and "watch" as if they were a movie. Private screening in its strictest form...

[sheff_dogs]

I have posted an anonymous post about kitchens, because Windows 10 logged me out of some things I stay logged into when it updated. Sorry.

[e_moon60]

Understood.