Someone I just met the other day asked me what it was like to live “the writing life.” I tried not to laugh out loud. He made it sound like I must be holed up in a sleazy hotel room someplace “on the road,” with a portable typewriter, slugging scotch out of the bottle and raving about my childhood traumas. The answer is, it’s a beautiful thing to be able to challenge your imagination every day, pushing it further, forcing it to perform. It’s also scary, because your paycheck depends upon your ability to do this, and the imagination is a notoriously uncooperative thing. Then, of course, there’s the issue or marketing oneself, which I used to think was a thing you could hire someone else to do, but no. I can’t hire someone else to write my blogs can I? When my writing is the very thing that defines my work? So, I entered the world of blogging and I found that I liked it. It’s my warm up every morning. Sometimes, it’s my cool down at night, too. So the marketing life has turned out to be a pretty interesting addition to the writing life. The best part about it is having an audience and being able to reach out to them.
That’s What You Get for Eavesdropping
On my latest trip to Boston, I had a somewhat unusual experience. First, I was in a cafe where a woman was sitting with a bunch of her girlfriends chatting. I’d say she was in her sixties, which I mention because it makes the story more interesting. And she was talking about a vacation she … Read more
