Writing is an art. A craft. It takes skill and dedication to make it work.
Selling it is a job. It takes learning and experience and dedication for it to take you anywhere.
If you want to keep a journal and record your thoughts and log your feelings and talk about why it is you feel the way that you do and you want to share it with other people on the internet in the form of a blog or a personal web page, more power to you. I love wordpress.com for that and I love facebook.com for that. For no other reason than it lets me be open to a whole bunch of people that I know that I would never get a chance to have regular contact with because of the way that everyone’s lives are structured. I love writing in this thingie about all of the things that have gone on in my life and what it is I am working on and what it is that is on my mind. I am not addicted to Facebook, but I do like going on and seeing how all of the people on my friend’s list are doing. And I like seeing the pictures they’ve posted and tagged and want to share with people. That is what is the most awesome things about the internet.
That does not make me a writer. That does not make me an artist.
What makes me a writer and an artist is the work. It’s buying textbooks on literature and to do the lessons on my own time and to read the work of better writers before me who were good enough to be able to do it for a living and to take notes on what made them good. It’s commiting yourself to writing five hundreds words a day, every stinking day, no matter how good or bad you feel, no matter what kind of mood you were in or what kind of day you had. It’s going back on the second day and writing that five hundred and first word as if only a second had gone by between that keystroke that the twenty four preceding hours of life, love, work and everything else never happened. It’s going back on the third and the fourth and the fifth day and knowing that when to stop and the story is told. It’s going back on the sixth day and starting a new story and forgetting the old. It’s the seventh day where you are trying to convince yourself that what you finished writing two days ago was goddamned perfect when in fact you know it needs a re-write but you just started something one day ago that is going really really good. It’s the fifteenth year where you look at a pile of unfinished work and say fuck it and fuck you and fuck all of you and I am never going to write another goddamned mother fucking life sucking word because it is all just so much bullshit because you are not going anywhere. It’s six months after that when you realize how much of an asshole you are, because you are back to the first day and struggling to get through those five hundred words.
Writing is a job, like any other. You may go every day, but it doesn’t mean you love it. It means you have to.
And, on that note, attached here is my eighteen hundred and thirty three words for tonight (plus the five or six hundred so that are written here).
My daughter came up with the name for the car, the Ford Alligator, when I tried to explain about the name of the really big truck that was bearing down on us while trying to get on the northbound ramp of the DVP from Bloor. My wife gave me the story idea about what the Big Three should do to get out of their slump. I thought of the whole repo man idea because, well, what’s so exciting about solving problems – I wanted to create one. I’ll finish the story tomorrow night.
the-problem-with-the-ford-alligator5
And fuck me if it didn’t take 5 goddamned tries for this little bitch to work.
Sorry. It’s late and the cat’s shitter needs changing.
Posted by ulyssesred 
Posted by ulyssesred 