Sometimes, being a writer can just really stink.  Whether you like it or not, all your emotional stability and happiness is invested in your writing.  So if you’re not happy with your writing, you’re just not happy.  About anything.  Even worse, if you try to run away and ignore it because it’s just too painful to even read, you end up only feeling more and more miserable.  Consider it an inverse ratio: the less you read it, the more miserable you are.  Suddenly, anything else you try to fill your time with only makes ignoring it more painful.  You try to talk to your characters while you lie awake at night, only to find that they’re giving you the cold shoulder, refusing to talk to you until you start writing about them again; and trying to forget them is like trying rip out your own heart.  And, horror of all these horrors, if you doubt your plot, doubt your characters, doubt your ability, doubt it’s ever going to be any good, doubt the whole shebang, really doubt… No, no doubt about it, being a writer is dangerous, not the least to your mental health.

Think about it: you can toil and slave away for years, drawing together this scattered story, and when you’re finally done that work, the dreadful shadow of edit & revise comes over you.  You sell your soul to this horrible being and weep as you watch it tear apart your beloved story bit by bit.  But lo! at the end of it all it hands you the perfect story, just what you wanted it to be.  That happiness is fleeting, however, for you must send your creation forth to battle the vulture publishers and perhaps face rejection.  And when it finally defeats one of them, it must undergo more edit & revise until it is a book in its own right.  Finally, when all that is said and done, you and your book must face the horrors of marketing, and rejection shows its ugly face once more.  And in that cracked sidewalk in your mind, a small idea is poking up its head between the dead cement, demanding to be nurtured and loved and grown into a book.  And being a writer, you can’t help but say yes.  So it all starts all over again.

And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.