Oh Woe! Woe is me!
My husband works long hours, much of it on the road, driving all over NY, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. He also deals with reams of paperwork, medicare forms and people who are excessively demanding. He comes home, wolfs down his dinner and then has about one hour to spend with the kids before they go to bed.
It’s tough and yet sometimes I feel as if my job is harder.
Why should writers think their lives or their jobs are any different from anyone else’s? Is there a sort of expectation of being protected, cared for, to have someone deflect the bad things for us? I thought that was reserved for Saints.
Am I some kind of masochist?
I work alone. I set my goals. I discipline myself. I pour my energies into work that I love doing more than any other work I have done including recording musicians and owning my own company.
And yet sometimes I need a pat on the head.
Am I defective? Do I ask for too much? Do I expect too much?
Why can’t I just do the work and then at the end of the day, put my feet up and relax in front of the box with a nice cup of something. It’s a job, right?
I feel like I am living the life of my dreams and yet I am not happy all the time. OK, no one is happy all the time, but I feel like I should be immune to depression and insecurity because the structure of my life is self-imposed. No one is clamoring for my next book, but I have started work on one already. I mean, if months had gone by (like in excess of 8 or so) with no output of any kind then probably I’d be hearing from my agent, but as it is, he’s awfully busy with his job and he isn’t thinking about me much at all. Oh woe again.
No one, including my agent, told me I should aim to complete two manuscripts a year. That is something I decided. I set a deadline of August for LUCKY and a deadline of January for FIERCE. No one knows about these deadlines except for me (and now you). I decide when I’m going to work and how much I’m going to work and whether I can take a flake day and just watch dvds and eat cheez-its.
Blogging twice a week? I set that.
So what about the Frustration? Disappointment in myself? The let-down after the incredible high of finishing a book? The pathetic wallowing when the words don’t come easily? Aaargh. Get over it.
It’s all my head. I do it to myself. I impose discipline, and then I guess I want a cookie afterwards, or a back massage, or acclaim, or a nice big fat publishing deal. I know it’s all about the work, the freedom to pursue it, the joy inherent in actually doing it.
If I could just look on my work as a job, much the same as my husband’s, I would gain some perspective on it. Of course I’d still have bad days. I wouldn’t be cushioned from having to deal with the defective septic tank because unfortunately I’m the only adult who’s home during business hours.
Some of my writer friends leave their houses to work. They go to the library or the local coffee shop. They distance themselves from all the daily life stuff but I like being here. I like looking out the window at a familiar landscape, and I like being steps away from my work center, with my reference books close by.
Working from home always causes you problems. Either you don’t do enough or you do too much. There’s seems to be no sensible middle-line. There are times when I think of nothing but the story I’m writing. I realize that I haven’t had any conversations with my husband except for a few sentences in my head, as in, “remember to tell dear husband that we are out of cheese,” and the thoughts just waft in and then waft back out again and it’s only a few days later when I’m trying to shove together a quick dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches that I realize our conversation never happened.
Apparently there is a cook-mother-wife JO and a writer-story-teller-masochist JO and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Georgette Heyer has a wonderful depiction of a poet in, I believe, The Grand Sophy. His name is Augustus Fawnhope and he is lovely to look at it in that Lord Byron sort of a way- firmly molded lips and curly, wind-blown hair- but he is useless if you need a chicken caught for dinner or help over a fence. If you want someone to write a sonnet to your nose, he is definitely the guy.
I’m not an Augustus Fawnhope by any means, but I do understand the desire to just give oneself over to the muse (not to mention wallow in the frenetic despair and hopefulness that are part of being published) and forget all about the mundanity of daily life. Let someone else remember to do the laundry and figure out how to feed an incredibly picky child when there is nothing in the house but dried beans, bread and one hot dog.
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