Full Time Writer!

Picking up on Jaleigh’s post from last week. Admittedly I’m intrigued by the squirrel sex, but let’s move on.

Writing full time is the dream of most writers I know. Unfettered time to write! Working in your pajamas until noon! Or hell, not even getting out of bed until noon–you’re the boss and you’re setting your own schedule, after all. Sure, there’s the whole not-getting-paid-every-two-weeks thing, but you know–that doesn’t matter when you’ll be writing and selling four novels a year.

Yeah. Here’s what my days spent writing look like:

9:00 a.m.: Turn on computer, check twitter and facebook to make sure the world still exists.

9:15 a.m.: Confirm existence of world, laugh at cat pictures, get sucked into the Bloggess’s new post.

9:30 a.m.: Start writing.

10:00 a.m.: Grab more coffee.

10:10 a.m.: Resume writing.

10:30 a.m.: Pee and do a load of dishes.

10:50 a.m.: Check twitter to make sure the world still exists. Check email.

11:00 a.m.: Resume writing.

11:20 a.m.: Hop onto wikipedia to do a bit of research and get sucked into the Illuminati.

11:45 a.m.: Resume writing.

12:15 p.m.: Leave to meet a friend for lunch.

 

You get the point. Is writing getting done? Yeah. But like Gary said, there are a lot of mental and physical breaks in there.  If I were to become a full-time writer for real, I’d need to be structured and disciplined with my day–writing in the morning, no internet or chores until the afternoon, that sort of thing. And I’d need a word-count goal–something like 3-4K would be a reasonable. Working for yourself would be awesome, but you need to be able to hold yourself accountable in order to pull it off.