Today, I had a taste of the writer’s life.  Some of those outside of the industry might envision a book tour, shaking hands and signings, or meetings with movie producers and merchandisers, interviews with Oprah or Good Morning America, or even sitting in a perfectly appointed office with neat clean with a large oak desk, blithely typing perfect prose and finishing another novel, piling the pages in a box to be sent to your NYC agent.

This is a fantasy. Oh, someday those things might happen but the ‘everyday of writing’ is another  matter. It’s fighting to get your kid to school and chugging down a coffee so you can jump start some semblance of your once clever brain. On the wonderful days when you don’t have to also run off directly to the day job you have to finance your writing career, you still have a house full of responsibilities, dishes, laundry, dog, cat litter, making and breaking appointment and running by the grocery store. When that is done, part of you wants to just ‘check’ your email and Facebook and an hour later you realize the three hours you were going to write is now down by one.

After getting a tea and a snack and searching for another half an hour for the notes you jotted down while at your dreaded day job, you finally sit down to the screen and the cat’s want attention, the phone rings, you realize you haven’t exercised in three days and you will soon grow to the size of a Thanksgiving day parade balloon.  You remember you had to get your daughter set up for driver’s training and now the laundry needs to be put in the dryer.

At last, after a third scoop of peanut butter, you sit and make your fingers move.  Even if it’s just a blog post, even if it’s to edit a page or three of the short story you need to send in by the end of the year, even if it’s to write down a plan to avoid all the distractions. Cause you’re a writer and once you fight through the fluff that is what you do.  So someday I may be on a talk show or meet  a producer, or my first draft might come out perfect, and I may have all the time in the world, but that doesn’t make me a writer. Today I’m a writer, because I fought the distraction and I wrote.