The e-Writer's Place Writers Resource - You Have to be Nuts to be a Writer!

I am determined to be a published writer. I have possibilities. And lots of enthusiasm; something which I'm told is not easy to sustain as a writer.

Especially when your favorite cousin falls down laughing when you tell him you're a writer.

Then he got rude. I had to come up with positives about my profession before I gave him a snotty answer. All I had to do was concentrate.

I enjoy writing, there’s no question about that. But I work best by the process of elimination so I thought about other professions and tried to come up with positives and negatives about them first before I defended my own profession.

My cousin, the laughing bricklayer, just dropped an enormous brick on his foot last month that put him out of the workforce for six weeks, since his big toe is broken. Also he's in pain.

The closest I can come to comparing this negative to a negative in my chosen profession is I drop my printer on my big toe. That's not happening. However, I could get yet another rejection for a perfectly readable and exciting magazine article, but I can still work with a broken ego. Gotcha, Cuz.

A dear friend is a school bus driver. The kids he drives to and from school are grade school age, so it's not like they bring Uzis to school. His worst incident is that a few months ago the kids all had fun throwing their lunch box contents at him. He had to spend hours tweezing Twinkies and cheese and bolognie strips from his hair and ears.

My closest comparison would be if random gangs of children broke into my house and tried to stuff cheese sticks into my floppy disk slot. Since I don’t even use my floppy drive anymore, I could just entice my cats to feast on whatever’s sticking out of the drive. They love cheese, by the way.

-I can take a break without getting yelled at for being at the water cooler too long.

Except for the rejection thing, I couldn't think of anything negative. Well, maybe I could wish that I made more actual money. It did occur to me that maybe I am nuts to be a writer but it's so much fun.

I can deal with any negatives someone else might suggest, so long as they don't suggest I see a therapist. I don't have time -- I have writing to do!

Lyne Royce is a freelance writer living in the desert east of Phoenix. She lives with her devoted husband and six spoiled and previously stray cats. She's fervent about Native American history and enjoys reading books on the subject when she has the time. After 15 years teaching software classes, and two years doing Web site design, Lyne decided to listen seriously to her muse and has participated in writing workshops and clinics on the Web, including the Writer's Digest Workshops' Fundamentals of Non-Fiction Writing, Focus on the Non-Fiction Magazine Article; WriteRead.com's Query Letter Clinic; Writers.com's workshop Writing and publishing Magazine Articles; the humor clinic, Writing from the Left Side of the Brain with Jane Combs; and Secrets of the Professional Freelancer at Coffeehouse.com. She belongs to several writers discussion groups but her favorite, Writers Pad, is where she enjoys learning from her writer friends on a daily basis that it is possible for a writer to become a published writer.