the word does not mean what you think it means

[bedlamsbard]

The other day one of my friends told me, very seriously, that she thought being a writer sounded like a great job. "All you have to do is get up whenever you feel like, lounge around, write a little, lounge around some more, maybe write a little more -- it's like the best job ever!" she said, looking excited.

I did not burst out laughing. I feel very proud of myself.

She's in the business school. I feel that the B-school's and the College of Liberal Arts' ideas of "work" do not always overlap.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Obviously your friend has never had to deal with having three stories at once banging on the inside of her head saying WRITEMEWRITEME and evaporating the moment she puts fingers to keyboard. Or with getting the story onto the page and seeing it's come out all wrong. Or with having to cross-check everything to avoid research-fail and canon-fail. Or with deadlines.

(Rough draft of eight-to-ten-page paper due in twelve hours. Six pages done. The information is all in my head, and the words even line up in the right order, provided I'm looking at something that isn't the document I need to be typing in. If I'm looking at the document I need to be typing in, all I can think about is the timelines of seasons one through three of Supernatural and how they change if Jess fit the pattern of all the fires being mothers of six-month-old babies. Apparently the most important change is that Sam dies in Nightshifter instead of All Hell. I haven't dared poke at anything post-No Rest yet. I tried typing up the reimagined Pilot and Nightshifter but ended up staring at a blank document thinking about the damn paper due tomorrow.)

[bedlamsbard]

Yes. *dramatic sigh* NaNo is falling to the side because I already spend all my free time co-writing with aella_irene, so by the time she gets off because it's two in the morning in London, I am too burned out on writing to work on the NaNo, or I have to homework, or I cannot look at a computer screen anymore. Am occasionally struck by debilitating guilt over the fact that Dust still isn't done and I am going to be known as the girl who wrote a 150K Narnia AU WIP. Papers, homework, etc. PLOT CHARACTERS WRITING ARGH.