What is it about sitting on your backside all day writing that makes one so hungry?
Yee gads, you'd think I hadn't eaten in days! Good thing there's no junk food in the house...
...but is mindless eating on healthy food better than mindless munching on junk food, or is a binge a binge?
Tough questions at the top of this last full week of October. Okay so perhaps not so much tough as vexing.
Who knew writing would be so perilous, so prone to attracting unhealthy food practices? I thought it would be all about a word-reaching, mind-stretching, heart-rending mission to put down on paper one good sentence, and then another, and another until a book is born.
That can take anywhere from a few weeks to, as in my case, a few years+. Then I'm told the real horror begins. Editting: ripping out the some of the best prose ever written, banishing the neatest characters and dropkicking the most intriguing plot twists.
But I'm not there yet. I'm still sitting here writing and eating good cheddar, nuts and salami.
Then in the middle of a delectable morsel a whole other thought train arrives A completely different story starts writing itself in my head. That's how this blogpost came into being, one sentence toppling on top of another until I just had to abandon my book and write here, right now.
I still have to produce 300 words, the same single page of coherent writing I've been working on since yesterday, by end of day. It's a query letter to an agent, pitching my memoir as the best ever narrative non-fiction. In the sea of memoirs now swirling in the bookstores? I have never excelled at selling myself. I'm more of a 'here I am, here's my story, you make your own decision' kind of person.
But now I'm heading into town - to go the gym to atone for all the bum-in-chair time and to get some more cheese, nuts and salami to fuel my word habit.
So that's how this writer's Monday is going so far.
©2016 April Hoeller
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