Boss Demons
Hi everyone!
Man does it feel good to be writing here again. I can’t even begin to tell you what it was like enduring the few weeks away, telling myself writing on the Quill was a drag on my career.
The honest, unvarnished truth is that it probably is a huge drag on my career. But it’s something I need to do, regardless of the albatross it may yet be.
I’ve written about loving your demons before, but while this is related, the daily writing demons are you co-workers, faces who you see every time you punch the writing clock. Today’s particular demon is your boss in the office of your writing mind.
Writing is hard. Like, really hard. Like, balancing on a uni-cycle while taking a calculus test only you forgot to wear your clothes and you’re on a high wire in front of the whole school-level hard.
In it’s way, writing breaks each of us who choose to ride the lightning. I’m not saying it makes us insane, nor am I saying that those who write have no mental fortitude. It’s quite the opposite: Any gaps we have in our defense we soon plug up, gathering steam until we are unstoppable behemoths of word-production. The trouble is, sometimes we aren’t as choosy as we should be in what we use to prop up our mental barricades. Wether it’s time constraints, or simply personal preference, some things that become part of our armor have requirements.
Take me. I started writing with this blog. Peppered Potash, I started writing primarily on this blog. It’s the source of most, if not all, of my literary achievements to date. While yes, I have published a few short stories, and yes, I have done a few things to attempt to publish a book, the reality of career is that this is my career.
So when I walked away from it, it felt like walking away from everything I had done which made me an author. Rational? Oh hell no. Reality? Undeniably.
And that’s the real takeaway from my own particular boss demon: There are reasons I write, reasons I create, and reasons why I work on the things I do which have absolutely no parity with reality, no truck with sense, and no dealings with practicality. They are, in a very real way, those things I do in order to continue the act of writing, because they are things I have told myself that I must do in order to continue the act of writing.
Make sense? No? Good. It’s not supposed to. These things often don’t, and that’s okay. This is part of the individuality of the writing process. Part of why successful authors share certain traits, but go about implementing them in such drastically different ways.
To me, probably always, I will never be able to divorce myself as a writer from myself as a blogger. Because, in the fortitude I have gained fighting the good fight day in and day out, there is no distinction between the two.
So when you find yourself in the coffee shop with a laptop, listening to a particular song at a particular time of day because that’s just how the words happen Chad so stop asking, remember this:
You’re not odd, or weird, or strange, or even wrong. You’re just doing what the boss asks.
Once the boss is happy, the words can happen.
Oddfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
