Saturday, February 14, 2009

Writing Projects in My Life

I've been thinking and re-thinking the latest Literary Mama essay and I don't know if I can write anything this month. (I like to submit to their monthly writing prompt) I can write plenty, but not in relation to having income envy. What I mean by that is that the writer of the essay talks about how she stayed home with her kids and raised them and she writes full time.

I could only dream of doing such a thing. I kind of have the opposite problem. I wish I could stay at home and write full time, but I can't let go of my full time income. We have a joke at work. We call our job there our "golden handcuffs."

There's a funny thing about sales. You can have a couple of bad months then you'll have a series of really good months and those are the ones that keep you there. Thus the reason I went back to advertising sales 10 years ago after a four year break. Now that I've really tasted the fruits of my labor it's hard to stop.

Where does that leave my writing? Like I've written before it leaves me time to write on lunch breaks, after work late at night, and weekends. I write on my blogs. But nearly not enough time to really feel like I can dedicate myself to a big project full time. So instead I do a series of small projects that fulfill that need to write.

This month I'm working on three. I received a very cool invitation from KUHF to participate in a commentary on what KUHF means to me. They invited me because of my This I Believe essay. So I need to write something up for that and they'll record it at the station.

I also need to start thinking about a March skirt! feature story. I have an idea of what I want to write but I also need to check with my editor, Dusty, about that.

Then finally I am submitting to Literary Mama, but just not a literary prompt. I'm going to take an literary prompt that I submitted a couple of months ago and I'm going to re-work it to submit it as an essay. That one I'm not as sure about.

I really want to submit something to Glitter Train again one day soon. Maybe not this month, but maybe next. I just need to get started on something good. I'm thinking of a short story that will turn into my novel later.

That's my "writing life" and so no, I can't relate to the writer in this month's Literary Mama essay. I write "in between the cracks" of my life, as another Literary Mama writer put it so eloquently. I only dream of writing full time. That would only happen if I won a lotto, and I don't even gamble so the chances of that happening are pretty much none. I'll just keep writing the way I do.

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