what writers do

Neil Gaiman posted on Twitter to say “I am sitting in an Indianapolis Starbucks writing a speech in a moleskine notebook. I feel like a lazy writer’s idea of what a writer does.”

This amused me inordinantly. :) I think it’s what people who want to have written think writers do. And people who talk about needing to Feel Their Muse before they can write. “Sitting in a coffee shop with one’s notebook,” said my Mom, “waiting for The Muse.”

“Staying out of the sunny windows and growing one’s hair too long so one can look Pale and Artistic,” said I in return.

Possibly I’m a little cynical. :)

(It reminds me very much of the person on Facebook who said following writers on Facebook and Twitter radically changed her perception of how writers worked. She’d vaguely thought, in so far as she’d thought about it at all, that it was, yeah, just that, sitting waiting for Inspiration and The Muse, but no, she had discovered, it was really WORDCOUNT WORDCOUNT WORDCOUNT MUST ACHIEVE THE WORDCOUNT! pretty much day in and day out. :))

Also, totally unrelated, I can’t help watching the news coverage of Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption (and no, I did not type that out, I cut and pasted it) and the consequential air traffic disruption, etc, and thinking something to the effect of “Welcome, Mankind, to the 21st Century. Just in case you were wondering, you are still Mother Nature’s bitch.”

ytd wordcount: 147,000