You Must Be A Writer

1. You must be a writer if, even when you've been procrastinating about opening it up, you are compelled to race to your WIP the moment a wisp of a good idea comes floating within the grasp of your conscious mind.

2. You must be a writer if there's a path worn in your house from the place you write to the place that serves up the caffeine or, alternately, caffeine-free beverages to which you are, nonetheless, addicted. (It's actually not about the beverage - it's your brain yelling at your sleeping ass to return some of the blood flow and feed it a little more oxygen...)

3. You must be a writer if, when you're on a hot streak and you see your ____ (spouse, neighbor, kids, dog, mother-in-law....fill in the blank) coming, you have an overwhelming desire to be able to turn invisible so you can keep working without interruption.

4. You must be a writer if you wish you never had to stop to 1) eat, 2) sleep, 3) go to the bathroom, or 4) go to w*rk. Such petty considerations should not be allowed to keep you from your magnum opus.

5. You must be a writer if, when you step outside after working very intently on your writing for a few days or weeks, you discover it's a different season than the last time you noticed*. (Not dissimilar from the situation where you've driven yourself home from someplace on mental auto-pilot, without having any recall of the details of the trip...but lots of details about what's going on in the WIP.)

Got any more??? {g}


* Michigan writers may not even notice this phenomenon, however, since the seasons seem to change much more frequently than they're supposed to. Seasonally, our year goes a bit like this (starting in January): Winter, Winter, Winter, Spring, Winter, Winter, Summer, Spring, Summer, Fall, Summer, Summer, Summer, Winter, Summer, Fall, Winter, Winter, Fall, Winter, Winter. {g}