Writing, All The Other Stuff – Part 1

When I decided to give writing a try after dreaming about it for four decades I thought the only thing that would hold me back would be my lack of understanding of the structure of the English language. Somehow in school I never was able to grasp it even though I was almost always an “A” student. I write by sound. Sort of like a Jazz artist who cannot read music. Feel free to pick this paragraph apart. See the problem?

But it turns out that this is the least of my problems. Well, if not the least perhaps not the most pressing. There is so much other stuff getting in the way. How about time for example? If you knew when you would take your last breath you could quickly figure out how much time you have on this earth. Assuming you are on earth of course. Say for example you live to the ripe old age of 80. That is 29,200 days, 700,800 hours, 42,048,000 minutes, or 2,522,880,000 seconds. Tick, tick, tick.

Note this is Mark math here and I do not recognize leap year in my calculations. Consider leap days as time bonuses. Enjoy that special day from now on with the knowledge that it is a free day and few things in this life are truly free.

Assuming you were not a child prodigy you are probably going to waste 25% of those seconds growing up. Now you are down to 1,892,160,000 seconds. Some of you may have used some of that time for writing but if you look back on it there may not be very much that could survive an edit by you now. But if you are one of those lucky few you can add some seconds back to my 25% loss generalization. For me it was all a waste. I do remember writing a story in 7th grade that I read aloud. And I remember my teacher saying to me something like “Kid, you got some talent, keep writing.” Sadly, I ignored his plea.

But at that moment I thought, “Wow! I could be a writer.” It was as of then my procrastination clock started running. You think you are a proficient procrastinator? I put this off for over 40 years. Try to top that.

So starting at the age of 12 I put off writing for the four decades (actually a little more than 40, but I am allowed to round down, no?) . I am overlapping my 25% waste base line by 8 years so I can add in the 32 year balance. Now I am down to 833,008,000 seconds give or take. Gulp.

Now consider that I will spend one third of those remaining seconds either asleep or lying awake worrying about writing. That leaves me with 582,785,280 possible awake seconds to write. I still have a day job and given my financial situation I will have to work until the end. Considering roughly a 40-hour workweek there goes another 43% of my awake time. Luckiy I work from home, so no wasted commuting time for me. Now I have 332,187,610 left. Gulp again. Unfortunately I still cannot use all of these remaining seconds writing.

What if I do not make it until 80? Holy crap. There goes even more time.

Okay Mark, stop obsessing. I will not bore you further with my arcane, inaccurate number crunching (are you still here?) but you can see my point. When I decided to resume my writing career I had no idea time was my mortal enemy.

Now that I have identified my primary writing adversary I can just imagine him (her?) sitting there across my office on the red couch, laughing at me. He is saying, “Go ahead give me your best shot. You got nothing.”

Darn! Now it’s time to post another entry to one of my other blogs. And I’m hungry and …..

Tick, tick, tick.