Once more into the Fray

“I’ve been listening all the night time. I’ve been listening all the day (in the words of one of our Jug Band songs).” I have. I have been listening to Jess Lahey and K.J. Dell’Antonia night and day for weeks. I got sucked in to their podcast #AmWriting. It is entertaining as well as informative and just plain fun to listen to.

The podcast is about writing and all things related to writing and their lives as professional writers. I’m not sure I’d want to be a professional writer even if I could. I wrote my four little books and self-published them, but I’m not into self-promotion, agents, book tours and pitching. I’m not writing in order to buy food. I’m writing just because I want to, because things occur to me that I want to put on paper and think about out loud.

Maybe I’m just dabbling since I’m not writing for fame or fortune. I don’t much care if anyone reads what I write. I just want to write it because I happen to like putting the words on the paper. Lately I’ve killed way more time listening to them talking about writing than I have spent on actually “keeping your butt in the chair and your head in the game” – their words not mine. It’s been months since I’ve written anything new. I spent part of that time revising and re-revising my first book. I can’t seem to finish with it. When I read it, I find things that could be phrased better or little errors which need to be fixed. When I rephrase and fix, I inevitably introduce new cut and paste errors which must then be fixed in the next pass which introduces its own set of new errors to fix. It never ends.

When I used to type up tests for one of the professors, I constantly had to redo my work because he would come back with just a little tweak to make the questions less ambiguous. Eventually he had to quit rewording because it was time to hand out the test questions. I need a deadline to force me to cease and desist. I can’t leave well enough alone. I hope this last updated version is better than the first. The only one who has benefited thus far is the publishing company which has produced and shipped six proof copies to me which I’ve marked up and changed and reordered.