The Thrill is Gone, Baby

I write for a living. This statement still fills me with pride, even though it’s not the kind of writing I daydreamed about during my time as a graduate student. That’s okay – it’s good work, and it pays the bills. But it doesn’t carry the zing it used to for me, back when I was literally amazed that my degrees and mountain of debt would ever actually translate into a job that paid by the year and not by the hour. But doing what you love for a living comes with one major drawback – the thrill is gone. When writing is no longer fun but is actually work, that’s when it becomes something I actively avoid, which is a problem for an aspiring novelist.

I’m an exceptionally lucky person when it comes to support networks. Barry (my boyfriend and constant companion), together with my parents, have always been there for me, with honest critiques and glowing, if biased, praise for my work. It’s helpful to me as a person that all three of them are creative individuals as well. Barry is a writer, a musician, a world traveler, class-A photographer and historian, to name a few. My dad is the next great philosopher, and my mother is an artist. In other words, I am surrounded by great thinkers and doers, each of whom owns a unique perspective on the world. But I am also a procrastinator. When you add that on top on working a crazy schedule, trying to fit in a run here and there, cooking as often as possible instead of eating out and trying to squeeze in a few minutes of QT with Barry or a brief phone call, the day is impossibly short. And after 10 hours of staring at a computer screen, either writing, thinking about writing, editing someone’s writing, or developing a strategic approach to a new writing project, doing the same thing at home sounds about as appealing as getting an unnecessary shot (I’m a needlephobic).

However, I recently did something fairly dramatic (at least, for me): I submitted the first 50 pages of my novel to a novel-in-progress competition. The thought of someone reading my work and hating it makes me want to wilt into a little pool of self-loathing (shout out to my old Prague buddies from 2003 and our communal pit of self-loathing), but in order to make myself get any real growth out of the book, I figured that outing myself in the literary sense was the logical next step. I don’t expect to win, because I know the caliber of writers I’m up against – and the amount of work they’ve undoubtedly sunk into their writing. However, some feedback would be wonderful, but even if nothing happens, my book has made its first sort-of-public excursion into the world, and I have made another baby step toward being a little more creative.