A writer's life is filled with deadlines, ghosts, and outlines and then somewhere in the midst of all that is actual story telling, right? No, I don't think so. Let's take a look at the obstacles that have plopped down in front of me in the last two weeks.
The first and foremost is that I didn't get my entry in the Marlene Contest submitted on time. Why? Well, it's my fault. I waited until 10 minutes before the deadline and sent it to the wrong email address (don't ask me how I did that when I thought I'd cut and pasted the email address) - but I did. So by the time I got the 'undeliverable' email notice it was 11:59 and guess what the deadline was? Yes. You got it! 11:59!
So that was January 15 - and since then, well let's see what else has hit the fan.
I got great feedback from my writing coach on 150 pages of story. But I also added at least 10 new chapters to the story via an outline that took me a day to write. At least tomorrow, I'm going to get help from my critique partner on the outline - the plot is a beast that's raging out of control.
Then there's my writing class. Yes, I signed up for another Gotham class, originally, it was going to be for feature article writing, but no I got out of that class. It would have required me to change my focus from fiction to journalism and even with feature articles, which is a lot less stiff than news writing - I didn't want to divide my time even more. So now, I'm in an advanced science fiction writing class, which I've taken before, but I feel smarter now:)...
The true dilemma in my life these days is not writing though. It's my day job. The one that pays the bills. It's lost its smiley face and that's disappointing and stressful. How do you balance that life and the writer me?
We'll just have to figure that one out won't we?
