Snow Day

Thank G*d for the snow! Fortunately, I don't have a house anymore so no shoveling. If class is cancelled tonight I won't have to go there either. Wrote last night before bed, actually stayed up late because I was writing. Will get back to it after this post. But you don't need to have time to write.

Picked up some little tidbits from L. Ron Hubbard on his thoughts about that (it's in Writers of the Future XXII):

"That is a queer mental quirk with people. If a man is a writer, he is doing something everybody thinks they can do."

I found this also to be true about teaching, which I did for five years. I knew a guy who came from the corporate world to teach... he lasted three days. Another guy lasted a couple weeks.

As a filmmaker you don't get a lot of respect either.  People would say it was easy because they thought it was all fun and games, but I've worked on set twelve to sixteen hours a day with just a 15 minute lunch break. I was on set before anyone showed up and left after everything was put away, and before and after I was writing or editing videos. (I also worked with a lot of so-called "professional" crew who couldn't shoot worth a sh*t, or didn't know how to do their particular job and had to be lead around by the nose).

This is what L. Ron has to say about people saying they could write if only they had the time...

"It's their way of an apology, I guess. Nearly everyone makes that remark and, to be brutally frank, it is a source of much merriment in the professional ranks... I have a law around the house here which says that writing comes first and the hell with everything else. The lawn grows into an alfalfa field, the pipes drip merrily, the floors need paint but I turn a deaf ear to pleas and go right on writing."

He goes on to say that his writing pays for all those chores to get done and covers all the other expenses. When times are tough you just got to push yourself to write. You make the time.