Where do you write best?

/ A.J. Colby / 4 Comments

As someone who never leaves the house without at least one notebook and a fistful of pens stuffed into my purse in case a moment of inspiration should strike me while I’m out and about, I’m curious to know if anyone else writes somewhere other than their home / office.

While I do get a fair amount of writing done at home it tends to have too many distractions for me to be consistently productive – that load of laundry that needs doing, those six episodes of Once Upon a Time on the DVR, and my horde of fuzzy minions all vie for my attention, so as odd as it may sound I’m actually my most productive at my local bar. At least once or twice a week Mr. Awesome Sauce and I go hang out at our local bar which is kinda our own version of Cheers, where everyone really does know our name, and knows that I am working on finishing my first novel. With an endless supply of Diet Coke, chips and the best damn green chili in town, it has turned out to be a surprisingly good locale for me to jot down several pages at a time.

I’m not sure if it’s just that we happen to go to the bar at my peak time of day for creativity, or if its the constant hubbub of background noise that makes it so easy to write while I’m there, but whatever it is, I’ve definitely found that I can write a helluva lot more there in a couple house than I can in an evening spent at home.

What about all you folks out there in blogland – where do you write best?

Writer’s Block – Thy Name Is Fear

/ A.J. Colby / 1 Comment

As I am rapidly approaching the end of the manuscript for Hunted I find that I am experiencing more and more bouts of writer’s block, and can’t help wondering if any other writers struggle with the same problem, and what it is that drives us all to be so damn afraid.

For me, and I’m going to assume for many other writers out there too, writing has been a lifelong dream that I’ve just begun to imagine could become a reality. I’ve spent years working what we all refer to as our “day jobs,” slogging along in the monotony, all the while dreaming of the day when I could cast it aside and focus on writing full time. I’m not there yet, not even close, but with the last words of Hunted looming on the horizon it’s more of a possibility than a dream than it ever has been before. And that scares the pants off me.

Insecurity has played a large part in my life, it is what originally drove me to seek the comfort of books as a child – if the other kids didn’t want to play with me, well that was just fine, I’d go read a book instead. It also encouraged me to have a vivid and creative imagination, the myriad fantasy worlds I could create in my own head were a hell of a lot more exciting than the real one where I was lonely and often bullied. That insecurity and feeling of being apart from others followed me into adulthood, and while I’d like to think that I’ve come out of my shell, and am considerably more socially adept than I ever was as a kid, I still have that vicious little voice in the back of my mind telling me that whatever I do will never be good enough. That voice is such a bitch.

I think it’s high time that I told that voice to piss off, and the easiest way to do that is to prove it wrong.

Easier said than done, but still easier than simply giving up and locking away my dream. My passion for writing and desire to be an author is as much a part of who I am as my hair color, my addiction to Mountain Dew and the fact that I snort when I laugh (it’s embarrassing, but funny as hell). Giving up on writing would be like cutting off a limb – I’d never feel whole again. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to say a big F-you to writer’s block and keep on trucking. It’s hard, and it sucks, and I feel like most of the words I’m conjuring up are utter crap, but all that matters is that I’m still putting them down on paper, that I haven’t given up. Hopefully when I emerge on the other side I’ll discover that I actually crafted some pretty decent stuff, but even if I don’t at least I can be happy that I worked through it and can get back to the good stuff. Either way a crappy writer is still a writer; a writer who’s given up is just a dreamer.

My days of dreaming are over.