Absolutely brilliant short essay by Jimmy So for Newsweek that touches upon a subject near and dear to me, the actual “work” involved in writing:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/06/26/why-should-a-writer-retire.html

For me, writing falls very much in the category of work.  Heavy, often frustrating and almost always mentally draining work.  The moments are few when I don’t think about skipping the work of the day/hour and getting out of my chair to “take it easy”.  Yet there is another huge chunk of me, paradoxically, that looks upon the works I’ve already done and is so damn proud of them and craves and encourages and demands I continue working and get even more books or short stories out there.

To be a writer, you have to be disciplined and willing to spend long hours alone in your mind, often being a harsh task master and culling the good ideas from the all too frequent bad ones.  And then, once you’ve got that magical first draft done, you switch roles and become your own harshest critic, dissecting each work and sentence and paragraph and chapter over and over and over again until you finally feel your work is ready to be released.

Once released, you can enjoy your accomplishment….at least for a minute or two.  Its not too long before that voice in the back of your head tells you to get working on your next story…and make this one better than the last, OK?

Which is my cue to get back to the latest book of the Corrosive Knights saga, sitting in the hard drive patiently waiting for me to get to her…