More self-involved thoughts on writing

(I wrote this on Saturday, during our heatwave. It's something that I don't really understand why I'm posting it, but whatever.)

I haven’t been writing for about a week now, save for the Ammy Award posting of last night.

I’m coming up on a self-imposed deadline. June 1st is a day I’ve committed to for a little while now, the day I finally sign up for writersmarket.com.

I love writing, I do. I’d love to write for a career. I’d love to write rants for a career, specifically. For my two cents, for my opinion to bring me a paycheque every month would make me the happiest girl on the planet.

And the act of pursuing that scares me to death.

At what point does the fulfillment of writing just for the act of writing stop being fulfilling, I wonder? At what point does it become necessary that you have a larger audience, that you get readers who have a vested interest in reading what you have to say?

Because I know I’ve crossed that line.

Writing for myself doesn’t cut it right now, not anymore. I’m at the point where I need to learn whether I really can push the buttons that provoke people to think, inspire them to act.

But the fear is paralysing me. It really is. I don’t have writer’s block because I can express what I want to say. That’s not eluding me. I fumble a little more these days, have to go back and rework entire sentences because they’ve come out backwards from what I meant, but it’s no real obstacle.

It’s all about reinvention, after all.

I’m at the beach and writing on my laptop now, a couple hours after this tome began. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I left home on my bike, though. What am I willing to do in order to accomplish what it is I want? And more important,ly, what the fuck is it that I want anyway?

I do know what I want. I just don’t want to say it out loud yet. But what I also don’t want is all this fear. Fear of failure, fear of trying, fear of finding out. Fear of succeeding.

Right now, I’ve managed to fashion a life in which I have little or no responsibilities beyond what it is I want to have. I have almost complete control over what’s asked of me. I take a smug satisfaction in this, but deep down inside, the lack of challenge has me teetering on the brink of apathy.

I’ve earned this, though-- this period of apathy, abandon and underachieving is something that’s been a long time coming.

But now I’m wanting a little more. So, I guess it’s that time. Man, this growing up thing’s a bitch, eh?