I am a writer. I Am a Writer!  I AM A WRITER. Nope. It doesn’t matter what formatting I use or how much I sit at a computer and bang away at editing books that never go where I think I am sending them, I still don’t feel like a writer.

Presently, I struggle with The Curse of the First Chapter. (Which, if you ask me, really ought to be a Hardy Boys Mystery. It would, of course, involve a Ghost Writer. Ooooh, new tangent…a Ghost Writer who is actually a GHOST Writer. Wait…where was I…?) Right…writing and the joys thereof. Continue.

I have been writing the same series of book for about…three…or ten…years, depending on when you actually start to count scribbling as an real book. I have managed hundreds of thousands of words. And I have re-written the first chapter of Book One about nine billion times now.*

(*Only a slight exaggeration.)

My work does seem to be getting marginally better. I no longer have meetings clogging up my book. (I hate them in real life, why would I write one into my book unless everyone gets blown out an airlock and dies a mercifully swift death?) I am learning to weed out the miscellaneous extra characters that have populated my novel like ants at a picnic. (Don’t worry, there will be a remedial course in over-used metaphors in my near future.)** But I cannot seem to be happy with anything for long.

Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net by Photo Explorer 

And, of course, I refuse to show My Precious to anyone. Copyright infringement notwithstanding, Tolkien wasn’t far wrong about how obsessive someone can get about having the power to rule the world—which is pretty much how I see writing. I rule the universe I have made. I am a petty god and I want sole discretion to build and destroy it at a whim. But like many a creator god, I want a bevy of worshippers to look on my work to fall down in awe and be sore afraid. Just…not afraid to read it.