The Real Reasons Authors Go Mad

1)  Bic sells 8.76 billion stationary products yearly. Out of that 8.76 billion, I’d guess more than half are the kind of cheapo ink pen just about everybody uses. Yet, writers never seem to have a pen and can never locate the package they swore was in their desk drawer where more pens could be found. I bet your average author spends 15 minutes almost every single day looking for ink pens.

2) Eventually, even lesser known authors (such as myself), will get fan mail. Sometimes that fan mail is nice, but sometimes you get things that are a little bit of a mixed bag. Like a written account of blood play fantasies involving the fan and the author. Or a severed body part. Or something in crayon depicting explosions and vampires.

3) Contrary to popular belief, coffee makers cannot remain on 24/7/365.  Eventually, they burn out and you have to buy a new one, but there is always a small window of time where you’re out of coffee. Though this window may only be temporary, the experience is traumatizing to authors. It’s typically our life force.

4) Utility bills are to be paid monthly, yet a lot of  publishers pay quarterly, forcing authors to stretch and budget.  Some of us are good at that. Others? Well, not so much.

5) Somewhere, some poor, innocent young person having no prior experience with vampires is reading Twilight for the first time.

6) When an author sits down to write, wherever it is they write, he/she does certain things to get in the zone.  For each of us, these things are different, I’m sure, but all of us have a routine or a thing we have to do or maybe just certain conditions which we absolutely need. There’ s always something.  But, more often than not, something gets in the way to screw all that up. Maybe it’s the phone ringing off the hook. Maybe it’s the author’s writing playlist being accidentally deleted by a knee jerk reaction. Or maybe it’s the author’s nieces and nephews jumping all over the place, doing kid things. Yup. Whatever the author was intending to write just went right out the noggin and into the super secret hell good ideas go to when they’re abruptly aborted.

7) Snooki wrote a book…and people bought it.

8) A real conversation with a real person:

Person: So, you’re a writer?
Me: Yes.
Person:  What do you do?
Me: I write books.
Person: Ooooh.  Ya know what you should do! You should make one of your books into a movie!

9) While it is true most fiction writers spend hours every day having conversations in their heads between characters they have created, people who do not really exist, it is not completely true that we always know the difference between things that have actually happened that day and things we wrote that day. Sometimes I eat dinner twice, but skip lunch and breakfast…and one of those dinners was written dinner, not actual dinner.

10) After years of writing, authors stoop. Our eyes stop working properly and we squint, even through our super duper ultra crazy thick glasses. We hear noises that aren’t there. Bodies we buried in our fiction begin to pound against the walls in our office spaces. Yet, we wouldn’t trade it for anything on this earth.  We are truly, amazingly gluttons for punishment.

 

Also, there’s this article about creativity and mental illness…

P.S. I found your pen and you can’t have it back.