Ensure Your Hu$tle Fits Your Grind

Don’t decide you’re going to make dance the center of your life when you hate bodily movement. Don’t front to say “I’m gonna churn out X-amount of novels” when you loathe writing and despise reading. Don’t lie to yourself and say you’re gonna be a gazillionaire when you’re not willing to take financial responsibility and change the way you think and do things.

The hu$tle has to propel you more than the dollar signs do. It has to get you out of bed when you’d rather remain knocked the fuqq out. It’s gotta make you stay up late sometimes when you really should be resting. Like love, it should make little sense to the outside viewer, yet propel you beyond your known limits. It’s gotta be like blood flowing through your veins. If I cut you, would you bleed interesting words, catchy phrases, technicolor dreams, and twisted ideas? If not, you probably shouldn’t be calling yourself a writer!

(Something of) A Love Letter to My Scribbling Siblings

Dear Scribblers,

We are a special lot; a peculiar people, if you will. We are those who create from the vast inner space that lies between our two ears. Though we are not God, we exercise a power very much like the Divine. We lord (or in some cases, BROOD) over the paper and the writing utensil. Like addicted physicians, we draft our own prescriptions while attempting to make sense of a world that is just as crazy. We sip the spiked Kool Aid and find ourselves asking for more. Maybe we are insane for holding up the worlds we’ve made like Atlas with a lower back problem, but we DO. We MUST!

The chance of becoming rich and famous doing this is slim to none. And yet, living for the positive review, and the chance at building a fanbase, we carry on. We burn midnight oil and speak of our characters as if they are real. On the planets we fashion for them, they are. Using the mental dust found on our cobwebbed library shelves of experience, we form the clay that makes the heroines, leading men, foils, monsters, and villains that inhabit our universe. We bend and break rules of gravity and physics to get our points across. Not an easy feat to pull off while pecking the keys with our noses because our straitjackets were recently refitted!

I love writers. We dare to strike a match and curse the darkness of boredom and normality. We spin stories of places that may never exist and try to make sense of a real world that does not. We press on. We dream. We write.

Keep scribblin’.