The roller coaster from last week has rounded the first turn (yes, I know I just mixed my metaphors with my picture of baseball). I am no longer a full time writer. There is a surprising mixture of relief in what I thought would be a long bearing stress in that. I read a quote that week about not dwelling on the past, and doing our best with today, and that is the shift I’m trying to make. The sorrow still lingers, as I haven’t figured out how to produce as many words per day now that I can’t bring my laptop to work, but I have a plan.
Last week, I read a lot instead. This is okay, especially since it beats taking insurance calls, and because as a newbie author, I need as much exposure as possible to the books out there. It may have been Tracy Hickman who said an author’s range of ideas is like a kitchen cupboard; where the amount of books we read is similar to the amount of ideas we have to pull from in our own stories. If you haven’t read widely in the genre you write, you are likely to produce a cliche story derivative of stories everyone else has read, while you think your ideas are unique. As a Science Fiction author, I’m embarrassed by how little I’ve read. I happened across a copy of Cryptonomicon, a nice 8pt font, 1120 page book in a freebie pile at work, so I’m giving it a shot.
The balance has been writing for an hour or so in the evenings. This is nice because it is uninterrupted, or at least more so than I had in the front lobby, but it also cuts into my time with my wife, which is sad, but not uncommon for writers. I heard an podcast interview that week where authors said how much they like their day job, either because of how it gives their minds time to mull over the story so that when they get home they almost hit the ground running, or because it keeps the pressure off of how writing for food might take the fun away. I have been blessed to have a job that allows me to write in the downtime, so I have been able to do both. Who knows… I’m writing this at work on the computer they provided, pinning Notepad in a small window under the cameras. After work, I’ll print out a short story I had critiqued and edit with pen and paper tomorrow. The issue that led to me losing my laptop privileges is resolved, and I have a feeling this will work better than getting a job in a call center. Maybe I am still a full time writer. I don’t know. I guess that’s why I’m calling this “rounding first.”
Rounding First
About Timothy C. Ward
