This is the boring part.
For you, not for me. I'm spending a lot of time writing. Or thinking about writing. Or getting drunk and talking about writing. I'm covered with ideas, they spill out all over my desk and on to the floor and even as I try to write them all down so I can come back to them later, I lose more than I save.
But for you, there's nothing new to see here. Move along. It's just a stale entry that you read yesterday or the day before, or maybe the day before that.
I went out with my cousin tonight. She's a lawyer. She's got a house and a great husband and a dog. And at the end of the night she paid our tab, gave me a hug and headed home.
Our tab was nothing outrageous and I'm pretty sure for her it was an afterthought. I found myself thinking "man she's lucky, having money to spend like that."
But it's not luck. She put in the work. She did well in college and went to law school. She works hard at a job she's good at. She wasn't born a lawyer, she's just reaping the rewards of everything she's done up until this point. It has nothing to do with luck.
People tell me that I'm lucky to have a site under the Rudius banner. Or that I'm lucky have a job with Rudius Media. And if I could talk about the project I'm currently working on, people would tell me that I'm lucky to have that.
Lucky is being born with a trust fund or an eleven-inch cock. Lucky is an accident of genetics. Lucky, most of the time, is a detriment. People who are lucky rarely understand what they have until it's gone and then it's too late. Luck is bitterness waiting to happen. Luck is hubris. Luck is all the people who won the lottery only to go broke. Despite what they'll tell you on homicide shows, sometimes it's actually better to be good.
And that's why this is the boring part. Because right now I'm putting in the work and the work isn't sexy or glamorous or exciting. In fact you can't even see the work. The work is spending five hours on a four-page scene which takes minutes to read. The work is doing a ton of research so that the reader never gets pulled out of the narrative. The work is writing yet another revision, which means trashing a lot of work that came before it. Let's face it. The work sucks.
It's the payout that's cool. It's connecting with the reader and knowing that they appreciate what you've done that's sexy. But I wasn't born with a trust fund or a pornstar dick. I've got to put in the work and that means that this is going to be boring for a while.
For you though, not for me.
Posted by Ben Corman at 9:42 PM