The inside of a writer’s head…

Today I was catching up with Twitter and came across the most gloriously humorous tweets from kaytsukel about things she’s learned by  being a writer. I related to most and laughed a lot and thought that writers are all in a common place. So whilst I walked the dogs, I tried to think if there were any idiosyncratic points peculiar to me … and decided nope, there were none.

But what I learned was:

1. That I spend most hours in a day in a world apart from the one in which I live. I carry a world and adventures in my mind which is why I trip, drop and fall quite a lot. Mind not on job.

2. That I am becoming more solitary by the day and risk being a crusty old woman with two snapping Jack Russells in tow. And because of 1., they tangle at my feet and ‘I trip, drop and fall quite a lot. Mind not…’ and so on.

3. That when I’m in company, I’m boring. No one wants to know what Gisborne is doing, how many words I typed today, how many I deleted. My head is in a space they don’t understand and I’m not concentrating so ‘I trip, drop and fall quite a lot. Mind…’ well, you get the picture.

4. The tendonitis that happened in a tripping accident last year has got worse due to relatively long moments of inactivity and when I get up from sitting at the coalface, ‘I trip, drop and f… ‘ yeah, yeah!

5. I’ve become a chocaholic, especially when the fallow periods occur and when I get up to fetch more chocolate, ‘I trip, drop…’

6. I have the potential to become alcoholic because those fallow periods can be deathly awful and  ‘I (really do) trip…’

7. I’ve become a time waster: I should write so I walk the dogs, check emails, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress stats. ‘I trip and fall’ to the chocolate cupboard. If the sun’s over the yardarm, ‘I trip and fall’ to the fridge for the wine. I daydream. I flick through stored images telling myself its fact-finding or inspiration!

8. My friends have strange names like Bo Press, Resabi, November Bride, Summer Dreamer, Hyaline, Fiction Witch, Servetus and many others and I can put a pin in every country in half the known world to represent them. And I don’t ‘trip and fall’ when I do it.

9. I’ve become a slight nerd. I can wade through the vast techno-lingo to get back on line when the server drops out. The fact that I can’t text or even FIND my messages on my mobile is neither here nor there. If ‘I trip and fall…’ at all, its more to do with cables in the former and concentration in the latter.

But 10. is super revelatory. I’ve learned to fight fear and submit my work to readers, be they professional assessors or real readers. In each case, I’m laying myself open to ridicule and rejection and I don’t care anymore. It’s all a learning curve and as the curve sweeps and bends, I become a better writer.

So you see, that’s 10 things I learned today when I examined my writerly life. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s almost sun over the yardarm time and I’ll just ‘trip and fall’ to the kitchen …