It’s something I’ve only become conscious of recently. When I write, when I mange to extract the right words from my head, I get high from it. That, and I experience an immense feeling of satisfaction that no other work gives me. There’s a scale to it too, from lowest to highest buzz it goes:

9. A clever tweet/text.
8. A short blog post or observation.
7. A review.
6. A lengthy blog post.
5. An introduction (see below).
4. A Childrens book (I’ve almost finished one).
3. A song (finished one today prompting this post).
2. A short story (finished one recently and have felt happy about it for weeks).
1. A novel? Screenplay?

I’ve put a question-mark after novel/screenplay because I haven’t written one, but I’ve thought about it for a long time. I’ve a couple of stories I’ve been building in my head for a while. There’s a joke about the Irish that goes something like: “Every Irish person has a story in them, the hard part is getting them not to tell it”.
But considering the sense of satisfaction I feel after writing something short, I can’t help but wonder how I’d feel after writing a book.

I have the usual hang-ups that hold me back, mostly it’s the standard: What if it’s awful and nobody likes it? A couple of things have spurred me to over-ride this pointless concern recently:

1. I’m 35 and suffering from early onset middle age crisis. Seriously!
   I’m (Probably? Hopefully?) a little under half way through my life. I already regret not doing a whole bunch of stuff and not taking a whole bunch of chances. I’m 100% certain I’ll regret not writing, more than giving it a shot and failing miserably.
2. The second confidence boost came from the foreword I wrote for the Garfield Minus Garfield book.
   I guess you could say this was my first paid writing gig. Paws Inc commissioned me to write a 1,500 word long introduction. I was a bit nervous about it. What the hell can you say about Garfield/Jon for 1,500 words?! I spent a couple of days writing and sent the first draft off to Paws. Mark Acey (Paws Inc lead writer)  got back to me immediately and said he and Jim Davis really liked it. Then, to my utter amazement, the foreword made it through their copy-editing process to print with no amendments.

So I’ve got a couple of goals at the moment: I’d like to do some sort of writing course (address all those bad habits I have), and I’d like to lock myself in a cabin somewhere for a weekend (some place with no internet access!), with a couple of books, a lot of coffee, some pens, a bunch of post-it notes and a laptop.

First and foremost though I really need to clean this desk.