I am a writer. I work from home full time, by the furnace, in my basement, for 5 plus hours give/take each day –as much as I can squeeze in between shuttling kids, volunteering in class, wasting time on Facebook, tending to whichever kid is sick, doing household chores, and attending recovery meetings. Showers are optional, as is makeup, regular pay, good credit, and discipline. I admire those who view writing as a holy exercise, an exculpation of endless toil and labor, but I also pity them in that same way you might pity someone who nods at you while riding their bike toward an unseen drainage ditch (Stop!! Don’t do it!!). Writing is such a petrifying undertaking and so very easy to avoid (especially when one is a parent, or someone who likes to fold laundry, or walk to the mailbox, or make gourmet meals), and so incredibly demoralizing most of the time (so few books get published, and even fewer sell, or make more than a few hundred dollars for the writer), that one requires a kind of bubble of romanticism or denial to even entertain the notion.

WRITERS LIFE CIRCA 2009

Since becoming a published writer a few years ago, after the dust settled, the reporters stopped calling, and the book tour ended, I became a zen koan – wherever you go, there you are. After the brief hullabaloo died down, and the small groups (mostly friends) were no longer required to sit and listen to me read, I realized I was just as before, only slightly diminished. As it turns out, the only difference between being published and not being published, is the feeling that I can now officially call myself a writer. Being a writer, like being human, is only adding thought and work to the original amoebic form and then waiting for the discipline or overflowing life force to kick in. Or, put another way, shaping the ideas into words and lying prostrate, begging to be recognized, published, adored, interviewed by NPR, and given a sizable advance large enough to pay one’s student loan for one more month, or at least make good on the bounced child support check.

There is a popular notion that artists write, or paint, or sculpt, because they must. That somehow, the having to writer obviates the need to hole up awhile in a basement while the children play upstairs with the sitter (who you’re paying so that you can write, so you better write and not shop for shoes on Zappos).

I honestly don’t know why I write. Only that I do. Better than some, worse than many, to some effect (some bills get paid, others don’t), and with some success.

WRITER'S LIFE CIRCA 2011

This writer’s life is humble and often humiliating, small flashes of neon followed by miles of dull road. People light up when I tell them I’ve been published. Unless they themselves have been published; in which case, we share a sigh and split the bill dutch treat.