Fair warning. If ever you decide you want to be a writer, it will require you to pretend like you are a writer long before you actually are a writer, so you know, you will have to write.. a lot… which will infringe on everything in your entire life… you will forget things like grocery shopping and sleep and human contact… you will wake up at 10 in the morning on accident, terrified that your characters ran away because you neglected them. Then your kid will remind you there is no food in the whole house, yet you’re more worried about your character getting lost in the couch cushions… then there’s the whole ‘forgetting to eat’ debacle… then your husband looks at you like ‘I don’t even know you anymore!! Where’s my wife??’

And then, by the time you’ve actually put any words on the page, you realize it’s time for your actual worky job… which… SURPRISE… requires that you write more stuff for the next 8 hours, all of which has ZERO to do with your novel or any of the 20 ongoing short stories you may have sitting open at the bottom of your screen.

You consider reading books on the subject of how other successful writers do it, but then you remember that you already did that once and that book pretty much said, “your life is about to start sucking hardcore,” and you thought to yourself, “Bah! Such bullshit. I am so much more brilliant than this assclown anyway.” Yet that assclown already has like a million bestsellers and junk, right….

So anyway. Back to accidentally waking up at 10 in the morning. Yeah. So, that happened because you woke up at 4:00 absolutely certain that you heard a rumor that one of your characters was planning a coup d’etat to oust you as the grand poobah storyteller because you can’t figure out what the fuck he’s supposed to be doing right now, I mean, it could go either way, you know? So, you’re just like… okay, well, I’ll sleep on it…. which, I will go ahead and say, “sleeping on it” is the worst thing you can ever do. It is not a solution. It’s pretty much like hanging yourself in the bathroom with those strings that are permanently attached to your fingers and your imagination… because that’s what you will feel like, your body is just a slave puppet to your imagination… Food? What’s that? Sleep? Fughetttaboutit.

And then suddenly you’re all like, fuck this shit. I’m gonna eat a bowl of cereal.

And then you’re like, “why the fuck am I doing this again?”

And then you’re like, “ooohhh…. right…. because when Ms. Flibbityfuck in the 2nd grade asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said ‘I’mma gonna be a WRITER!” And then I looked at the calendar a couple months ago and I was all like…. holy shit, I’m gonna be 36 years old soon…..

So now, it’s 10:50 in the morning… I ate the bowl of cereal… I haven’t even worked out yet, which I’ve already cut back from 2 hours every morning to less than 1. Not even to speak of all the wifey/motherly shit I have not done… and at the bottom of my screen sits two stories from two completely different genres in two completely different stages of undoing….

I’m almost positive they’ve started whispering to one another about how they are going to divy up all my shit after I die… which they are positive is going to happen any moment now… a kid just walked through the living room mumbling about starvation or some such nonsense… my belly hurts, my ass is fat, my hair is pulled into a ponytail too tight, I haven’t even put on a bra yet, a couple of my characters need to start puking or bleeding or fucking some inanimate object or else I’m gonna murder them in their faces, my novel’s concepts are bigger than the distance in all dimensions between here and epsilon eridani, and I am seriously considering dropping everything and searching on ebay for all the awesome vintageness of the complete collection of the Electric Company, swig on a concoction of Vodka and NyQuil and watch the pretty colors flash on my TV screen until my brain melts.

I’m either doing it wrong like a boss.

Or I’m doing it right like a boss.

Either way, by the time I actually am a real live writer, at least I know my soul will be appropriately tortured.

And I will have plenty of psychotic delusions about all of the evil, quasi-sexual, strangely psychedelic, quite nonsensical shenanigans my characters are getting into when I am not watching.