Quote of the week - Priorities

"I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing." -- Ken Kesey

Amen, brother!

I wish I had a buck for every time I've heard a writer say, "When I'm writing, I tell my kids not to bother me unless somebody's bleeding" or variations thereof (blood is always factor, though). I understand the motivation -- they want me to understand how dedicated they are, how disciplined, how important their writing is to them.

Writing's important to me, too, but I've never said this, or even thought it. If one of my kids has something to tell me (even if it's not "important"), I want to be interrupted. The writing will still be there, but those golden moments when your child wants to interact with you? They are precious.

Does that mean you don't teach your children to respect your writing as work? No. This will happen if you treat it like work, if you approach it with some degree of discipline and determination, and whether or not you get paid.

I've been doing much work on the Manuscript That (Almost) Ate New York. I wound up cutting 72 pages. Yikes! That's a lot, even for me. And surprisingly, it's not outrageously short now. Still, I'll be adding bits here and there, and especially smoothing out the "choppy" bits.

But now, it's a beautiful, warm day, and I've been cooped up in the house for the past couple of days working, so I'm going for a walk. As I noted last week while on a walk with the hubby and Daughter, some women train for marathons. I train to walk around Manhattan!