I must be crazy. I worked on 50 pages last night, reading and editing. I got through it all and went to bed at a reasonable hour (for me anyways). I lay in bed and thought – that whole scene needs reworking. Over and over in my mind it rumbled and I knew it had to be redone. For 15 minutes I lay there thinking about how it should be rearranged – the pieces were mostly good but they were in the wrong order.
Could my brain shut down and let me sleep after I made the decision? Oh heck no. I got up at 11:30 last night to redo part of the scene – did I mention this is 50 pages I’d worked on for 3 hours?
I worked for 45 minutes rewriting and rearranging. I got several pages redone and moved around. To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t have a day job I wouldn’t have quit working last night but I had to get up this morning.
It is times like this where I wish I could be doing this full time. If I made enough money to cover my current income and our insurance needs then I would quit working my day job. I’d write full time and hopefully sell lots of books and articles.
Sadly I am not making enough writing so I will continue to go with little sleep and a bit of frustration. The thing is I love the challenge. I knew this story needed an overhaul and as I’m doing it – I am LOVING it. It’s a challenge to let go of the ideas I had before and allow new ones to take their place. It’s fun to see how the story will wrap around itself differently with this tweak or that change.
The words tumble and almost trip over themselves to get on my paper. It is amazingly enjoyable for me to struggle through this work. Hopefully when I’m done there is a story that others will want to read and enjoy.
I will say that it is possible to get rid of your job and do what you love full time. I remember how stressful nursing was for me and I wanted out of it sooo badly. Then the Goddess swooped in. She flat out took it away from me. It was a very hard couple of years in the fiery transition period… but after Pele' finished the destruction, Hecate came back in and gave me my income back, my life back, a nice car, and returned the love of my life to boot. I cried I was so amazed and now my life is all my own to go and come as I please. You have to be very brave, but the Goddess will grant you whatever you want with enough faith.
Eileen, welcome to the life of a writer. Especially now, when books are mainly being distributed electronically rather than in print, and articles about anything and everything are available online, making a living as a full-time writer is if not impossible, is very difficult. But we do it because we can't imagine doing anything else, don't we?
Kat.. I'm happy your life has turned around. I know that I will eventually get to the place where I'm writing full time. It is going to take time. Until then I'm still doing the day job route. I enjoy my new job – lots of life experiences – which is good for the writing…
Smoky… I know it is a tough market out there. This is one of the reasons I cling to my day job. Even though it means I'm lacking in sleep, I'm LOVING the editing process and looking forward to completing this project. It has actually encouraged me to go back and look at some of my other in progress projects to see if I can revitalize them. It is funny how I have NO choice when it comes to words – they flow and I write…