Metashiz

It's a curious sensation watching something you've done go viral.  I keep feeling outside of myself, like I'm watching me watch the numbers.

It's nine o'clock in the morning and I have 7,200 hits on my blog.  It the time it took me to take a shower, I got more hits than my best day ever prior to writing Changing the Creepy Guy Narrative.  At the rate I'm going "Creepy Guy" will surpass my all time best article (20 Ways to Sabotage Yourself as a Writer) by about ten thirty [ETA: it was more like 10:08].  "20 Ways" is an article that has been pulling in a healthy trickle from Stumbleupon for just under a year.  I seriously thought I was never going to write anything ever that did that well.  At the rate I'm going, in about four hours I will surpass my best month ever with just today's traffic--just today's.  If this keeps up at its current pace, at about this time tomorrow, the page views of the last week will be roughly on par with the page views of the rest of this blog...since I started it...in February...of 2012.

See these tiny little bumps on the left?  Those are the "really good" spikes  of my normal traffic patterns.
You can see yesterday where I thought "holy crap that's a lot of hits!"
And then there's today....

In the time it took me to write the last paragraph that number has gone up to 8,300 (or up by 1,100 views).  To put this into perspective, prior to yesterday, about once every month or two, I would break 1000 and do the Snoopy dance.

Also, I am not a slow typist.

I'm not saying any of these things to brag.  The writerly exhibitionist in me, vaguely prideful at having written something so successful, was shrinking fast in the rear-view mirror yesterday about two hours after I posted it.  That was replaced with the shocked face of someone who has just been told their own mother drowned in asparagus pudding.

This morning what I feel is more akin gnawing sense of doubt and unease.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.  I feel like I'm dealing with a situation that's way over my pay grade.  Obviously I'm a blogger and I want to be read by lots of people but 24 hours ago (well, maybe twenty EIGHT hours ago) I was just doing my thing and getting excited about having a month of 15,000 visitors instead of 14,700.  Everything was kind of ramping up in a natural progression.  Then suddenly I felt like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Part of the reason is just that this is not a normal article, and I sort of feel like the rest of this dog and pony show will seem a little discordant.  I'm getting followers on Twitter, Facebook, and G+ and thinking "you know the next article isn't going to be anything like this one." I very much stretched the connective tissue of a personal experience to be "about writing" by using the motif about narratives.  I count myself as a feminist, but Writing About Writing is not a feminist blog or an anti-sexism blog or even a blanket social justice blog.  It's about writing.  Except for a quazi creative non-fiction piece I did right after the SCOTUS ruling on DOMA called Waking From Nightmares.  Some of my fiction explores social issues but the blog itself is usually mostly a snarky mix of craft, process, and review articles and some guest bloggers who have just......epic amounts of issues.  I'm not going to change what I'm doing here, and I'm happy if the exposure brings me a few new readers, but I'm still a little aware that later on today when I make my last call for nominations on the fantasy novel poll or get risque as I answer grammar questions that some people are going to be thinking "What in the fresh hell is this fucking shit?"

It sort of sucks knowing that nothing I possibly write for probably years--short of how I went back in time and actually kung fu fought Nazis--will hold a candle to today's success, and it's a little nervous making to consider how many more people than before will be watching with horror as I do let Leela Bruce blog or write an entire Mailbox about threesomes to annoy an evangelical Christian.

Part of the reason I'm anxious is (as one of my commenters on that article and long-time friend pointed out) that I feel a little embarrassed by all this attention because I didn't think of what I did as particularly commendable.  I thought it was an epic snark and that at best I just happened to be using my powers of sarcasm for good.  The fact that he almost got violent was not really in my mind when I decided to be a smart ass.  I was glad to change that narrative, don't get me wrong, but I hope some day I can live in a world where the story of folks helping out a woman like that is considered common decency and basic humanity, and not something particularly worthy of praise.

Part of the reason is just overwhelming logistics.  I try to get back to everyone that comments but at this point that post is at sixty comments and I'm getting about ten an hour, so unless I wanted to just reply all day, I am simply overwhelmed.  I'll try to get to everyone eventually, but if it takes me a few days, or until after this post dies down, I'm sorry.  I could probably do it if I wrote nothing but replies all day, but I actually wouldn't want to do that.

And part of the reason is just because now so many damned people know that I'm not very good about remembering to put the commas in the right place.

This is What a REALLY Popular Article Looks Like in My World

So the article I put up earlier today on Changing The Creepy Guy Narrative went sort of "quazi viral."  (Viral for me, but there are a lot of bigger blogs that would still find my numbers today to be small peanuts.)  It has lead to the best day the blog has ever had, and the article itself was in the top ten of all time within two hours and at number two of all within eight.  Only 20 Ways to Sabotage Yourself as a Writer has performed better.  But it took something like three days to get to these kind of numbers.

Anyway, I really like watching analytics, and a few of you have expressed some curiosity, so I thought I would share the analytic charts from my best blogging day (so far).

Last two hours.  You can see it's actually kind of dying down.

This is the 24 hour view.
Hits peaked around 2.  It's still way way way over my normal traffic though.

Weekly view.  This is where it really becomes apparent how rare this is for me.

Monthly View.  If you look really close, you can notice the spike....

However, to keep it all in perspective.  This incredibly amazing, best-ever day has gotten me just about enough to make two dollars an hour for the time I spent writing it. So I'm not quite "there" yet.

Changing The Creepy Guy Narrative

How being a writer helped me rewrite a sexist trope...for real.

[Edit 3 (7/25/13): I speak to some of the more common comments, questions, and criticisms I've recieved in this Mailbox article. 

Edit 2 (7/18/13): Continue comments at the dedicated entry for the continuation of comments if you want a reply from me.

Edit 1 (7/16/13): This post has gone viral and it now accounts for over half the traffic that this blog has ever received since I started it in February of 2012.  Unfortunately, that means it's starting to show signs of conforming to the laws governing the "bottom half of the internet."  Some really brave and touching stories have come in under Anonymous comments so I really don't want to change the comment policy mid stream; however, rest assured that I'm actually quite okay cheerfully deleting anything that drifts into the territory of abusive or incendiary in its hostility (especially to other readers) .  Feel free to disagree with me, critique the writing, call me out, whatever (not all the comments below are congratulatory), but I'm going to ask that everyone play respectfully if they want to do so here. I'm sure you can find forums about this article if you want to be a meanieface.]

So a thing happened to me yesterday on the BART as I was coming home from work.  (Not sharknado, sadly.)  I want to tell you that it happened because I'm a writer--I want that because then I can write about it here in a blog about writing, not because I think writers are more awesome than other people. If I tell you this happened because of a unique set of insights I got from being a writer, then I can totally write about it here, and it's okay. But the truth is, awareness can come from many places, and I hope that a lot of plumbers and architects and beekeepers and middle managers and stellar cartographers would do what I did.  But just for this article, so I can put it here in this blog about writing, let's pretend it's not what anyone would have done. Writers are good at pretending.

You see, as a writer, I am also a reader--a big crazy, prolific-as-shit reader.  I've read two or three dozen articles my friends have linked over the years on women's experience with creepers on public transit--usually with some sort of commentary attached to it by said friend along the lines of "ZOMG THIS!!!!" or "SO FUCKING TRUE!!!!"  I've read Schrodinger's Rapist, Rape Culture 101, Jezebel articles by the dozens (perhaps hundreds), and even my own friends' tribulations on BARTs and busses.  I even read that article (which I can't find now) that lays out a well reasoned case that our culture's entirely fucked up sense of consent and rape culture exist naturally as an extension of the same mindset that cause women to be afraid of being blunt and honest when they get cornered in public by someone they're not interested in.  [ETA- One of the commenters knew the piece I was talking about.  It's called Another Post About Rape.]

Could "non-writers" have read all these articles and more?  Of course! (But I had to shoehorn a personal story into a blog about writing, so work with me here.)

And in reading all these things I've come to be aware of a narrative.  An everyday narrative almost as common for women as "the train pulled into the station, and I got on."  It's not that no one but a writer could be aware of this narrative it's just that in a world where tragically few are, that was my gateway.

It is the narrative of how men hit on women in public places.

A tired old story if ever there were one. A story where consent is not a character we actually ever meet, and where the real antagonist is not a person, but rather the way she has been socialized to be polite, to be civil, to not be "such a bitch"....no matter how much of a Douchasauras Rex HE is being about not picking up the subtle clues. Yes, a human being might fill the role of the immediate obstacle--and in doing so personify the larger issue, but the careful reader of this tropetastic narrative knows the real villain is the culture that discourages her from rebuking him in no uncertain terms lest she be castigated, lest he escalate to anger.  (And that's the best case scenario; the worst is that she angers someone with much greater upper body strength who has been been raised in a culture where every emotion distills into anger, where violence is strangely revered, and where his sense of entitlement is seldom hip-checked.)  The real antagonist is a society where she is actually discouraged from being honest about what she wants...or doesn't want coupled with the society that socialized him that he is entitled to comment on her...corner her...pressure her....be persistent to the point of ignoring the fact that she has said no.

I saw the heroine of our story sitting on the BART.  The train wasn't busy in the afternoon along the "anti-commute" line, so it was only a few of us spread out far and wide.  She was thin but not skinny and wore one of those wispy skirts that always make me want to send God a fruit basket for inventing summer.  The kind of woman my step-father would have gotten distracted by and then grudgingly called "a real looker."

So under Google images as available for commercial reuse,
I searched for the keyword "creepy guy."
This isn't him, but surprisingly, it's not TOO far off.

But what is much more important that I noticed, because I'm all writerly and observant and shit like that, is that everything about her screamed "leave me alone."  She had headphones jammed in her ears.  Her nose was down in a book (my hand to God, I think it was Storm of Swords). She was pulled inward with body language that couldn't have been more clear if she had one of those shields from Dune...activated.

But still....he tried.

He sat right behind her--already a warning sign on such an empty train.

The real antagonist may have been society, but our personification of it was well cast.  He had a sort of Christian Bale look about him, if Christian Bale were playing a role of a douchecanoe.  Revisionist memory is always suspect, but I'm telling this story, and I'm going to stand by the fact that I thought he looked like a creepy guy long before he started acting like one.

He waited until the train was in motion to make his move--a true sign of someone who knows how to make the environment work to their advantage.  Then he leaned forward.  "Hi."  "How you doing?"  "What are you reading?"  "What's your name?" "I really like your hair." "That's a really nice skirt."  "You must work out."

It was painful to watch.  She clearly wanted nothing to do with him, and he clearly wasn't going to take the hint.  Her rebukes got firmer.  "I'd like to read my book."  And he pulled out the social pressure.  "Hey, I'm just asking you a question.  You don't have to be so rude."  She started to look around for outs.  Her head swiveled from one exit to another.

The thing was, I had already heard this story, many many times.  I knew how it would play out.  I knew all the tropes.  I probably could have quoted the lines before they said them.  I wanted a new narrative.  Time to mix it up.

So I moved seats until I was sitting behind him.  I leaned forward with my head on the back of his seat.

"Hi," I said with a little smile.

He looked at me like I was a little crazy--which isn't exactly untrue--and turned back to her.

"How are you doing?"  I asked.

"I'm fine," he said flatly without ever looking back.

"I really like your hair," I said.  "It looks soft."

That's about when it got.....weird.

He sort of half turned and glared back me, and I could tell I was pissing him off.  His eyes told me to back the hell away, and his lips were pressed together tightly enough to drain the color from them completely.

But no good story ever ends with the conflict just defusing.  He started to turn back to her.

"Wait, don't be like that," I said.  "Lemmie just ask you one question..."

"What!" he said in that you-have-clearly-gone-too-far voice that is part of the freshmen year finals at the school of machismo.

And I'm not exactly a hundred percent sure why I didn't call it a day at that point, but.....maybe I just love turning the screw to see what happens. I gave him the bedroomy-est eyes I could muster.  "What's your name?"

Right now I'm sitting here typing out this story, and I'm still not entirely sure why I'm not nursing a fat lip or a black eye. Because that obviously made him so mad that I still am not sure why it didn't come to blows. There are cliches about eyes flaring and rage behind someones eyes and shit like that that are so overdone. But it really does look like that.  When someone gets violent, their eyes just kind of "pop" with intention--pupils dilate, eyelids widen. And his did. Even sitting down he was clearly bigger than me and I was pretty sure he was kind of muscular too, so at that moment I was figuring I was probably going to need an ice pack by day's end.

"DUDE," he shouted.  "I'M NOT GAY."

That's when I dropped the bedroom eyes and switched to a normal voice.  "Oh well I could see not being interested didn't matter to you when you were hitting on her, so I just thought that's how you rolled."

(Of course later, I thought of a dozen cleverer things I could have said, but, I'm going for honesty here.  I was tripping over my own words due to the adrenaline dump.  My voice was probably shaking too, and I'm guessing the line above was more shouted than said with even, level, movie-caliber cool.  I am in no way a badass.)

But whatever I said, or however I said it, it did the trick.  I don't know if he "got it."  I don't know if he just thought better of committing assault in front of the BART cameras.  I don't know if he just didn't want to escalate past bravado.  But whatever went through his head, he turned back in his seat, sat back (away from her) and muttered "asshole."  And that turned out to be this story's climax.

What I do know as she mouthed the words "thank you" to me as she stepped out the door of the Rockridge station. Worth it.

Obviously better bystanders than writers intervene every day; I'm trying hard to write about writing not suggesting we've got an edge in the being-a-decent-human department. Many others could and more men in particular should.  But what I do sort of think is that I was aware of that narrative because I am a writer. I knew the tropes and the cliches and the tired old lines. I was aware of how to create a role reversal in the "typical characters."  I'm aware that most men don't know what it's like to be hit on by someone they're not interested in who won't take their hints.  I look at things differently–tried to see the world from another angle.  I think what would happen if we told this story from another point of view. And sometimes, a bystander willing to intervene can change a narrative completely.

Good News, Other, More Different Good News, And Bad News

Bad news doesn't mean we have
to be Mr. Frownyfaces!

Hey y'all,

Chris here.

I have good news,  and I have good other, more different good news, and I have bad news.  And technically I have some other more different bad news.  And some third, other, much more differentish bad news that might only be sort of bad if you like that sort of thing.

Come to think of it, it's sort of like the Bad News Bears...during the robot apocalypse...after the nukes....with only spam to eat.  But why be a storm cloud when you can be a rainbow!

The good news is that Wibbly Wobbly time is over, so Writing About Writing's schedule should start to normalize.  I'll try to get the Mailbox up on Fridays and the main article up on Monday's again, and take the weekends off instead of T/W/Th.

The other, more different good news is that apparently Cedric pretty much kicked every guest bloggers ass up and down the WAW compound, and we can expect them to get their asses back in gear.  He even fought Leela Bruce to a standstill and got her to agree to start kicking the shit out of bad advice again.  So we can expect some good articles in the future.

So I guess that brings me to the bad news, of which there is much.

1- Cedric says Guy Goodman was passed out drunk and couldn't be asswhupped.  That's like four months in a row he's missed, and even though I'm paying him like 12 cents an article, I probably have to go talk to him about this.  This is the part of my job I hate.  I'd much rather lord over guest bloggers like a benevolent but all powerful dictator.

2- The SciGuy is doing time/space continuum experiments again trying to time travel and/or find a dimension in which Lt. Lambaste did not die.  This means he has been lax on firewall security and I have a bad feeling about this.

3- The last bad news is that I am missing the most epic film of all time, Sharknado.  Even as I sit here and write this, Twitter and Facebook are lighting up with Sharknado updates that I can't bear to see.  I am alone in my cold, empty Sharknadoless living room.  

Sharknado is clearly the best movie that ever was and ever will be--definitely including Snakes on a Plane, but possibly even rivaling Sharktapus. This means that the epic hard on I got last night for Sharknado will not be...satisfied.

See if I could have wild, unprotected sex with Sharknado, maybe you might have gotten a break from it while I blogged during my refractory period, and Writing About Writing would never know that I ran around the house all yesterday basically unable to see through the tears from laughing so hard at Sharknado, but since it is still an unmet desire, even just the fucking WORD Sharknado sends me into hysterics.

I'm not going to be over this obsession any time soon.  We can probably expect Sharknado appearances in upcoming entries.  So that's some pretty bad news right there.

Sharknado.

So really it's more like The Bad News Bears meet Sharknado.

Sally Struthand Helps Us Out

Hi.  I'm Sally Struthand.  You might recognize me from my famous seventies sitcom called, "Racism is Hella Funny!" or from all those starving kid and unemployment commercials in the eighties.  Work's been a little...hard to come by lately, so I'm going to help Writing About Writing and say some things that Chris is a little to embarrassed to say himself.


Do you want to get more entertainment and laughter?  Sure.  We all do!

Chris works hard to keep these articles coming, and he only makes about 25 cents an hour.  Now you can support the heart of independent art and entertainment.  Yes, I know Chris's blog can hardly be called art...but let's talk about that.

Chris has already talked about his plans to get a web designer and possibly even a copy editor here at W.A.W. and bring the place a touch of class.  Nothing says "real blog" like using an appositive phrase comma correctly.  He really does want you to have an experience that involves the right their/there/they're.  Really.

But what you may not know is that Chris is still waiting to see if W.A.W. is going to be a wonderful hobby, a supplement/promotion for his "real" writing endeavors, or something he does as a day job.  He gave himself a couple of years of really trying his hand at the blogging thing to see how it goes.

The jury is still out.

Yeah, we're not sure.  Send in more tea and scones and we'll keep talking it over.
SCONES, I SAY!!!

If Chris's numbers can improve in a way that he thinks W.A.W. has a potential future, he wants to be able to bring you more "meaty" articles each week (instead of just one or two), more fiction, and even more than just his short stories.  He hopes to bring you some of his longer works, including two manuscripts that are onto their third draft and might be ready soon to meet the public.

Whether those manuscripts meet the public here or in a bookstore is entirely up to you!

How Chris does on the blog that will determine if he proceeds with his longer fiction through venues like serial posting or possibly PDF file downloads, investigate e-pub and self publishing routes and attempt to offer his works as cheaply as possible, or simply hope that the blog gets him some "street cred" as he pursues traditional routes.  It's also possible that if numbers stay dreadfully modest, or stop improving at a fairly decent clip, that he may decide W.A.W. is never going to be anything more than a charming diversion (until/unless he has a larger audience of interest from those who like his fiction), and will go down to something more like a few meaty articles a month instead of pouring so much effort into blogging.  Right now blogging is really taking a lot of time and energy away from his fiction.

How can you help?

Not that Chris could blame you for spending
that money on actual coffee.

1- For less than the price of a cup of coffee, you can ensure W.A.W.'s survival, and possibly growth- Do you like getting paid more than twenty-five cents an hour?  Sure. We all do.

You don't have to give the price of a cup of coffee each day either.  Just like the price of a cup of coffee "in to-to" to quote Mr. Furious.  Perhaps you could donate the price of a cup of coffee each month if you're feeling crazy generous or want to be counted among the ranks of my patron/muses (who are straight up amazaballs awesome).  Chris makes less than $2/day here at W.A.W., so even small donations make a big difference.

The Paypal button is easy to find on the left side of the screen.  Literally nothing will ensure W.A.W.'s survival more than a few dollars.  Hey, you have to spend ten bucks to get two hours of entertainment at a movie whether you like it or not, so a couple of dollars, only if you're up to it, after ten, twenty, perhaps dozens of hours of entertainment is a pretty good deal.

And for those who DO donate (depending on the denomination) I regularly ask questions about the direction people would like to see W.A.W. go, give tie breaking votes in polls, and even write these folks into stories (usually as people who survive the zombie apocalypse or something).

There may even be swag at some point.

If you don't have money to spare, there are still lots of ways to help Writing About Writing make survive, and even thrive.

2- +1 this blog (the blog itself)-  Hit the "home" button up in the top left corner.  (It may look like nothing changed but now you're at the "blog" page instead of just this article's page.)  Hit +1 on Google.  Like it on Stumbleupon.  Give it a thumb up on Facebook.  If you do these things for THE BLOG ITSELF instead of just an article you help tremendously when it comes to blog listings, search engines, and general holistic stuff.

3-Turn Off Your Ad Blocker For the Sites You Like*-  Do you like free entertainment?  Sure.  We all do.

This doesn't just go for Writing About Writing, but any online sites you wish to support.  Everyone likes to complain about how mainstream venues don't take chances and they are so overbearing about forcing people to view ads.

But really mainstream sites are just running a "red queen race" against ad-blocking technology and no one without those resources (or gobs of fame) can make much money at all unless you turn that crap off.   Literally ad-block is killing what is awesome about the internet--especially when it comes to arts and entertainment.

A penny per 100 views are so can add up quickly, but those views only "count" if the viewer doesn't have an ad-blocker running.

Consumers don't realize how ad blockers kill independent efforts, and how impossible it is for artists to navigate a world where consumers not only demand free entertainment, but don't want to even be inconvenienced by ads either.  But you can help the sites you love by understanding this.  If you like something, the best way to keep seeing it is to help it make money.  You don't have to navigate the web without an ad blocker--just turn it off for those sites you wish to support.

Artists aren't actually particularly greedy in most cases.
(Certainly not compared to publishers or banks or something.)
But nothing kills that abundant creative flow
 like needing a day job to eat and cover the rent.

*Chris asked me to make it clear that he is not asking for blind clicks on his ad links.  That actually doesn't help him.  It can mess up his numbers and lead to problems with Adsense.  He just asks that you turn off the ad-blockers.  (And maybe then you see something you really are interested in.)

4- Subscribe- From publishers to advertisers, people who are looking at W.A.W. to decide whether they might take a chance on it will use certain bellwethers to decide.  Things like the subscribers, subscribers to feedproxy, and those who subscribe to it's various social media endeavors.

You don't even have to look at the subscription once you've got it.  You can just sign up and set it to ignore.  Being a subscriber at all is the supportive part.  If that's how you roll.

You cross-posted your damned blog again????
Get a rope.

5- Help W.A.W. Spread by Sharing Content- Social media proliferation is the hardest part about creating an online presence.  There's only so much you can do yourself before all your friends come to hate you and twitch at the sight of your avatar.  Helping a good article get to a few more eyeballs is one of the most supportive things you can do.  If you like something, share it.  And if you like a site or want to support an artist, be a little more liberal about what you share.

Help the things you love find new fans in YOUR friends.

It's easy.  It's free.  And it helps more than you can imagine.  So if you see an article you like--or just think it would resonate with a few friends, share that bad boy.

Chris has had a single person share an article that then got ten times the normal traffic because one of those people put it on twitter and then it bounced around.  One of my best performing articles of this year happened simply because Amanda Paterson pinned an image from one of my Mailbox articles.

It really makes a difference.

6- Click Buttons Do you like to click buttons?  Sure.  We all do.  I'll be honest with you.  Chris has no idea how search algorithms work, and I'm not much better.  He has no idea how Google decides where to put a page.  He has no idea how many people see an article on Facebook if it gets three likes vs. four.  But what he does know is that that stuff helps.  It makes articles get listed higher in search engines and helps random people find them.  Stumbleupon Likes....Google +1's....Facebook Likes....they all help.

And if you call now, and you can get your degree in gun repair right over the phone.

The Mailbox: Guest Blogger Amy Puts Down the Smack

She takes on one from the legion of "You Don't Have to Write Every Day" warriors.

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments may end up in the mailbox.  I will even repeatedly tackle the endless deluge of people who think that being a writer somehow involves not writing.]   

Anonymous says: 

You don't really have to write every day. For some people that actually kills their creativity.

Amy's* Reply:

[*Wait?  AMY???  Who is this AMY person?

Friend. Professional writer. Working full-time, I-pay-for-my-bills-with-this-shit writer. And she wanted a crack at this question.]

I'm a writer. I make more than a living wage as a writer. I do so by writing anything that someone pays me to write. Except marketing material. I don't have a good relationship with the exclamation point. We have … history. It's sordid and involves a lot of abuse to innocent metaphors. Much too ugly to go into here.

If you wanted to get paid to NOT do something,
you should have gone into agriculture.
~rimshot~

Besides, my point is that I'm a professional writer who makes enough money to eat proper meals that feature lots of fresh fruits and vegetables but no ramen, go on a vacation for 10 days every two years, and pay my San Francisco Bay Area rent.

Hey, let's talk a sec on that rent thing. I rent an apartment. I don't own a house. Kinda weird, hunh, given that a Bay Area rent is the size of a mortgage payment on a small Bay Area condo? Well, I did own a townhouse once. It was a very nice one, having been extensively remodeled and upgraded just six months before I bought it. For three long years. Long years. Did I mention that there were three of them? Yeaaah.

You see, when you own a house, you have to maintain it. When you get a slab leak, it's your responsibility to call plumbers and restoration companies and insurance companies, and then deal with assessors and contractors and oh let's just stop talking about it right here. Leave it at this: home maintenance requires time that I choose to devote to writing.

Don't mind us, Amy.
Unions?  No we're not talking about unions
We're...uh...talking about Joss Whedon and...uh...feminism.
Go back to writing.
Goooooooooooood.

Writing every day is so important to me that there are dust bunnies that have been annoying me for a month, and yet I still haven't done anything about them beyond throwing a vacuum cleaner around for five minutes to keep them from unionizing against an uncaring management that ignores them.

I write every day because I'm a writer. If I were a gardener, you bet your boots I'd garden every day. Graphic artists create and revise graphics every day. I had a friend in my early college years who was a professional violinist, and oh hells to the yes, she played violin every day. I remember that there was no point calling her in the morning because she started her practice session everyday at 8 on the dot, and didn't stop until 10:55 when she had to leave for class. Her commitment was so high that college was her second priority: she planned to take seven or more years to finish her four-year degree.

The funny thing is that writing has a unique set of detractors among creative endeavors. A substantial number of potential writers wave off the importance of daily practice even though they express florid passion about writing.

I have never met a musician who makes a living wage assert that three times of practice a month is fine or even three times a week. No one told my friend that playing the violin every day would make her into a less capable musician and perhaps even destroy her ability to play. She was a professional violinist, not a hobbyist. Other talented people trying to become professional musicians understand that the difference between a violinist who makes a livable income and a hobbyist is the level of commitment. Mozart didn't put his soul in a jar and hand it to Faust's tormentor to become amazing.

But somehow if writers like me have the same commitment, we will stifle our creativity? The hell?

What is it about writing that makes people think it's a delicate, fragile form of creativity that might shatter if you use it daily? Everything else we practice daily improves whether it's reading or drawing or muay thai. But somehow writing is so precarious it must be used only with caution?

No. Experimentation and history tell us otherwise. If writing needed to be handled so gently and its use metered, then it would not have survived to fill endless numbers of bookshelves for millennia.

I have written every day of my life since I was five years old. I cannot recall ever taking a day off. I've had several major surgeries, and still managed to put words on paper those days. When I don't write, I feel the same discombobulation that athletes who skip a workout day feel, and that sensation is only relieved when I write.

Worst. Easy money scam. Ever.

Until recently, my profession was being a technical writer. I still never skipped days from other writing. I always had an extra window open on my computer to write throughout the day. I always had a notebook and pencil next to me on my desk for the same. At home, I'd write more. And now that I've left my tech writer career, I have hours at a stretch during which I still write and write and write.

My tech writer career enhanced my creative writing. I could spend hours every business day writing in a pedantic style, giving my obsessive-compulsive writing eccentricities a place to play and simultaneously giving my creative writing their own place to play. And oh wow, how amazing when I'd let the two sides play together! My tech material got a little pop and my creative material got stripped of stupid tangents and hundreds of unnecessary words.

I'm not special or even approaching unique. Research says that I'm completely average. The rare successful writers who write much less than I do are the special snowflakes that the universe creates now and then just to make things more interesting.

It's a cinch to test if you are one of those rare butterflies who have so much innate yet fragile talent that daily practice stifles creativity. Try it. For an entire year, call your talent on its bluff: write every day. Be good to yourself by giving it all you've got. Don't submarine yourself by intentionally trying to foil the experiment. After the year, compare the body of your year's work with the body of your previous year's work. Don't worry about the ratio of complete garbage to acceptable draft. Just count the work that you feel inclined to save to expand on, revise, rewrite, and whatever else it might take to make the draft something you're pleased with.

You're normal if the ratio of garbage to salvageable leans toward garbage, but the quantity of salvageable is greater and perhaps of higher quality than the quantity and quality of the salvageable work from before the year's experiment.

And if not, then congratulations and sympathy: you have a huge talent for writing, but it's fragile and easily ruined. You're likely to be happiest as a hobbyist writer and to find a different profession.

Then you win this and you get to live the dream.

It's not the worst thing to have a different profession. You might even have a profession that you can tell your parents about and that might not prevent you from serving on the Supreme Court. Me? Oh hell, no, I am never telling my dad that I'm a smut writer.

Unless I just did.

Hi Dad!

My reply to Amy:

Word.

Trophy Case

Think.....gaudier.

Whether I hit 1000 page views or 150,000, I usually took the time to crow about it.  But rather than let all those posts float away into the cyberether, I'm going to put them in a gaudy display case down in the  Writing About Writing's basement.

Thank You--Yes YOU!!  (1000 Page Views)
Now that you've hit 1337 page views, what are you going to do?
25,000 Page views.  Thank you.  Yes YOU!
50,000 Thank you!!!
75,000 Our Purple Suited Book Pimp will have to wait.
One Year Old
Wetting Myself Over 100,000 Page Views. 
A Strange Sort of Milestone.  Thank you for helping me get here.  (124,000 Page Views)
150,000 Thank you!
Milestones & 400,000
Half A Million (500,000)
A Remote Milestone
Two Years Old
3/4 of a Million (750,000)
$2,500
Those Breathtaking Moments
One Million!
Three Million (And 500k likes on FB too!)