Thursday, March 13, 2008

Dear Hobb

Um. Two words: Time management.

Writing is writing. Manage your writing in the way that makes the most sense for you. If you're bleeding all over blogs and not bleeding enough in your fiction, stop blogging.

If you get satisfaction from both, manage both. If you write about insurance and tax prep at your day job in return for health insurance, write on your blog about writing, and fulfill your three-book contract on the weekends while taking kickboxing classes and working out four times a week and eating pancakes, awesome.

There's this fiction that we can have one thing and not another, that we're all or nothing. I write to survive. Health insurance, yo. I blog to reach to different sort of audience and fill a different need. It does completely different things for me than fiction writing does.

And I write fiction because it's what I love, what I've always done, because the pleasure I get out of that keeps me sane.

Survival. Socializing. Sanity.

I need all three.

And so I manage my time really, really well.