stacy benedict

Sure, being a writer has its challenges.  Self-doubt chases you like an angry pimp. There never seems to be enough time between family and the day job to write. Then, when you carve out an hour to work on your manuscript, a blank page mocks you.  After you’ve forgone sleep and ignored friends to grind out words, you review your eighty thousand word darling only to realize it’s a flaming bag of werewolf poo.

Yup, being a writer is awesome.  Here are my top five reasons why I love it.

Imaginary people are your friends.  Many times I’ve thought of my characters as actual people.  I’ll daydream about things they would say, do or find funny in my real life situations. Is that insane? Yeah, but so what?  According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.—43.8 million, or 18.5%—experiences mental illness in a given year.

You develop a thick skin. Not everyone is going to enjoy your work. Some people will hate your work. In fact, indie authors get to pay people (aka editors) to rip their hard work apart and tell them exactly what sucks and why it sucks so damn hard. Things that you wrote to be funny, beta readers may find sad or obscene or worse, unfunny.  All you can do is learn, do your best and kill them with a pickaxe in your next novel.

Doing research is fun and the more bizarre stuff you have to look up the better. Did you know in Greek mythology when commoners died their shades went to the Asphodel Meadows, which is the middle region of the Underworld that is neither good nor evil? Did you know the god Apollo punished a satyr named Marsyas by hanging him from a pine tree and skinning him alive because he lost a musical contest? Did you know Mantis shrimp (also called sea locusts, prawn killers and thumb splitters) have twelve different types of color photoreceptors in their eyes and have powerful claws that they use to spear, stun or dismember prey? Well, now you know and knowing is half the battle…of being a writer.  Go Scribblers!

That moment when inspiration hits you is like a sweet peanut M&M that melted in your mouth, not in your pocket. There are times when I’m working on an outline or free writing a short story, and I get stuck.  I don’t know how I’m going to push the story to the climax or how the piece should end. I think, and I stare at the page.  I stare, and I think, and maybe I cry a little.  Then, for reasons unknown, the fog clears. I find a way to move forward and that feeling is divine.

Being a writer is dead on sexy. Writers are walking, writing sex on a platter covered with sushi. We writers have to beat suitors away with a two by four. Next to telling people you’re a bad-boy-billionaire-rock-star with the abs of a Navy Seal and you also turn into a sparkly vampire on weekends, no one gets more ass than a writer.

Hope you liked this week’s blog post.  You can read the first chapters of my urban fantasy series The Children of Ekhidna and Typhoeus on the books page.

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