A writer writes.

2004-02-12 - 5:22 a.m.

I need to get the internet into my house. Having to rely on work for what, let's face it, makes up over half my social life, is not going to fly in the long term.

In other news, this is my last week as the midnight guy. I'm just hoping that somehow everything doesn't screw up royally. It's been some time since I had to get up and be anywhere at 8am (and if you happened to live on my paper route around '91-'92, you have an idea of how that turned out), and what with my planning to go to the gym before work that means I'll be trying to get up at dawn. Dawn!

Even though it's really just a small shift change, I'm feeling like it's going to be some monumental change. I guess it will be unusual for me to see the sun everyday, in abundance. Or to not have to plan when and how I will sleep. Or to actually see different people over the course of the day. I just hope that it doesn't suck.

Speaking of sucking, I'm on the fence about my opinion of my new editing teacher. The class is copyediting, and I'm expecting it to be somewhat difficult, because this is (or so I thought) the class where I'm to learn the bulk of applicable editing skills. The thing is, we've had two classes with this teacher, and I feel like he hasn't taught us anything yet. I'm a decent note-taker when it comes to academics, but with this guy I get nothin'. It gives me the willies.

I've promised some people that I would write an entry to clarify my comment in the last entry about merely having to decide to be something in order to become it (that was a really bad sentence. I'm aware of it. I'm moving on), but I'm not sure if that entry is coming tonight. I don't want to give the impression that years of study and effort are worthless, because obviously they aren't...but I think that in some fields, especially in areas like the arts, it becomes a little less clear what, exactly, is required to make a writer, or a painter, or whatever. (Oh look, that entry I hadn't planned on writing is writing itself. Sigh.)

I've heard people say that all it takes to be a writer is for someone to write...but is that true? Is someone who just wrote an essay for his grade 9 English class as much a writer as a novelist who's had four books published and is working on a short story anthology? I've always held that, in writing anyway, what someone's written is less important than what that person thought about themselves. There's no other way to really gauge whether someone's a "real" writer or not. About the best you can do is decide whether someone is a good writer (and even that has tons of subjectivity attached).

Argh, there goes the motivation to finish this entry. I'll finish it later. Promise.

Cheers,

The Magus

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