Being Human Is My Crime

The title of this blog entry comes from a Kelis song entitled “Lil Star”. It’s the song of a tired, demoralised woman who “forgets herself when there’s so many others around”.

I certainly can’t be accused of that. As my immediates enjoy reminding me, I have nothing of the carer in my nature. But I can still identify with the singer when she tells of “barely getting over the bar”.

I am completing the final stages of a novel while working full time. This is a serious endeavour as I’ve got professionals waiting to look at this last bit and it requires meticulous work to point the plot and characters where I want to go. When I get a bit of time, I find I can rise to the challenge. I’m writing better, in my opinion, than I’ve ever written before because this work is demanding that I raise my standards just that bit higher.

When I get a bit of time.

I want to write this as a warning or message to people who are writing and working full-time. For the first and perhaps the second draft, it works fine. But when you get to the point where you are under time pressure and trying to produce your best work, it’s extremely tiring and very difficult to balance the two. I want to warn people reading this that energy is a finite resource. I have put a lot of things on the back burner for this, and could not have more interested and encouraging colleagues in my workplace – they are sweethearts – but am still feeling exhausted.

Many people scoff at the idea of writing full-time but there are times when doing it the other way consumes every spare resource you have. I have NO redundancy / padding at the moment and have to be rigorous that I am in good mental and physical shape as a result. This will continue until the end of the month. All I have to do is hang in there and keep writing. But make no mistake: it’s very hard. Very hard indeed.