People have countless ideas of what it means to be a writer. Usually they range anywhere from romanticizing about a cabin writing retreat in the woods, to working three jobs, but still starving and struggling to make ends meet. I’m somewhere in the middle. I have spent time writing at a nice lake cottage and tropical resorts, but I also do have a “real job” during the day to keep my family sustained financially, because without that, I would absolutely be starving.
As with most aspects of my life, I tend to blur the lines and complicate typical, preconceived notions.
Most people tend to think of writers as introverted hermits; shut-ins who shrink away from social settings. There’s a lot of truth to that idea, but it’s not always a given. Some writers tend to be jet-setters, traveling the world for research for upcoming projects. Sure, those writers are established, well-known, and wildly successful authors who have the means to fund that lifestyle, and that’s fine. I’m not jealous or bitter at all. Nope. I’m certainly an introvert, but I can be a very outgoing introvert at times. I rarely like to be completely alone, almost always preferring to have a couple people around. Although, as I get older, I certainly recognize my agoraphobic tendencies getting stronger.
Another common trope is that authors do nothing but read and write. If only that were the case. As already mentioned, my day job kills the bulk of my days, while my evenings are typically consumed by family life. There is no “finding time” to read or write. No, it’s a very deliberate decision to “make time” for those activities because they are a priority for me. Having said that, at the same time, I’m also not very disciplined. I tend to be lazy and go too long between writing or editing sessions. As far as reading goes, admittedly, I’m lucky if I can finish an entire chapter without dozing off at the end of the night.
One last thing about me that catches most people off guard is my lack of affection (or even interest) toward two of the most successful book series in the history of humanity: The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. *Gasp!* I know, tell me about it. A writer who’s not well versed in two of the most known literary universes in the pop culture zeitgeist? That’s exactly the problem. The hype killed any interest for me. I hadn’t read the LOTR series prior to the movies being released, and my college roommate had a countdown on his computer for The Fellowship of the Ring starting over two years before its release. Come on. Seriously. That ruined any interest I had in anything related to that franchise. Harry Potter was a similar situation, minus the college roommate and digital countdown. I hadn’t read the books, and the hype for the series drove me away. Call me a hufflepuff, I guess. That’s fine. I would’ve potentially been interested if not for every single person on the face of the planet stuffing both franchises down my throat.
So that’s a quick little profile about who I am as an author. It can never just be one way or the other for me. Seems unnecessarily complicated, doesn’t it? Yeah, for me, that sounds about right.
Thank you, that is all.
CK Fiction 