Day Job

Here's an article I've never read: How To Write When Writing Is Your Day Job. I've been making my living as a writer for many years. I've written, produced and/or directed more than a hundred hours of film and television. The problem is that writing all day -- I'm in the production office from 8 in the morning until 7 at night -- leaves me very little time to write. I can't help thinking that it's easier to go from selling international gold futures all day long to coming up with cool and effective combinations of words at night than it is to go from words to more words. Hitting alt-t-w tells me that I am 46,358 words into my book, which only sounds like a lot because you don't know how long I've been working on it. Let's just say that my son who was not yet born when I wrote the first sentence has ex-girlfriends, a bad driving record and a beard. I've never written more than 900 words in a day. There have been times when I've written less than that in a year. This has to end. I love my book. I want to write it.

If anybody has any wise or encouraging remarks on the topic, I would love to hear them.

Mostly...

I created a blog so I could make comments on other blogs without resorting to Anonymous. And then all the blog titles I really wanted -- Room 101, Two Plus Two Equals Five, Eh Bien Mon Prince, Sixty Seconds Worth Of Distance -- were taken. The bastards! So I went with something from my favorite chapter in my favorite book: the sequence in War and Peace when Andrei passes an old oak on his way to Otradnoe and feels as wasted and barren as the apparently dead tree, and then, on his way back to Moscow -- after overhearing Natasha talk to Sonya about how she feels like she could fly -- sees the oak again, this time bursting into spring green, and feels reborn.