I am a writer, or I am having a mid life crisis. Perhaps both.
Not very long ago a good friend asked me:‘What are you going to do when your kids are older and you are a mum and a child psychologist? Don’t teenagers get a bit messed up about stuff like that?’
He was full to the forehead with mojitos though so it went more like this: ‘yor kidzzz rrr genna be serr ferrkd urp!’ to which I said: ‘Ayyyyy haff a planm, n itsh gerd ficken planm.’
‘The plan’ I have is to become a writer.
One thing I have guessed so far is that if you want to be a writer, you have to write. The I-am-contemplating writing and the I-am-writing-something-brilliant-inside-my-head-right-now writing doesn’t count. The biggest problem I have found with actual writing is that it is much more time consuming.
The other thing about being a writer is that you can’t be a writer-in-secret. You can’t just pile exercise books and memory sticks full of material under the bed. You have to share it with the world, or at least with a few people in it (hi mum!).
So here I sit, crushing my motherguilt as my 4 year old watches back to back episodes of Bananas in Pyjamas (who are just not clever, even for bananas), and I am actually doing it, I am writing, right now, and sticking it to ‘the plan’ at 3 words a minute.
My plan in its entirety goes like this: write something good and get it published. Or perhaps more honestly it goes like this: make some money from doing something I love (yes, writing). Then buy things I need for more writing, like a desk. OK, and maybe buy some other things I need that are unrelated to writing, like a new toilet. This is what passion and commitment looks like.
Of course I did some research on my new delusion, thanks Google, and I know that to get anything published, you need to have had something already published. Excellent. I also know that I need to commit to being a writer. Not just a Psychologist, parent consultant, business owner, mum etc etc blah blah, who writes in her spare time (spare time, funny). But A Writer.
So I am a writer, and I write. Good, done, check.
Now the bit about already being published so I can get published. This is where you can stay tuned - partly because that is the next piece of the plan, and partly because the Bananas DVD just finished (rat fooled them again). Clearly I think it is a fantastic idea to create a blog and post some of my writing on it, despite having no idea what I am doing. Then the plan is to attend writing workshops, furiously learn the business and write, write, write, submit, submit, submit (thanks to Google for that pearl too).