When I was a little girl I thought I wanted to be a famous singer. I carried that delusion far too long within my heart.

Problem with that delusion was that I could not stay on tune,neither could I sing worth a flip.

My voice when singing is a bit flat and I sing better tenor than soprano. I believe that may be because the lower you go in the octaves the easier it is to disguise a voice which is clearly off tune.

My mother was a painter and she would not have done well to suffer a child to follow her footsteps in that endeavor.

It is ironic that she has been wholly supportive of every single grandchild who has shown the smallest interest in artistic endeavors. She never once gave any of her children the slightest hope that they could paint or draw.

I may have a painter hiding somewhere in the closets of my soul but until my mother passes on I have no intention of opening that door for even a crack of enlightenment.

I did do some acting while in high school and college and I was good at that. However that was not considered to be a worthwhile or meaningful career according to my farming family.

So now I am a writer and it seems that everyone that I cross paths with thinks that they are a writer too.

They may have a plot, they may have a stellar opening line and they may even have character development. That does not a writer make.

It irritates me to no end when people make assumptions that they have the guts to be a writer.

It is pure torture to be a writer. You never escape the characters which have lodged themselves in your brain, screaming to get out on the pages of your novel.

It makes me want to go all psycho on them when they assume that just because they have an opening line to a novel I need to help them write a novel.

I want to choke people who go on and on about how good their book is. When they give me a free copy I am excited to read their book. The excitement juxtaposes into despair when  I can not  make it past the first chapter before I see a glaring editorial error.

Then their are the free loaders…

It amazes me at how crass some people are when approaching me for help.

I had a missionary ask me last week to help him gain traffic to his blog.

I informed him of my consulting fee.

He told me I should help a “friend” out for free, assuming I guess, that he thought I needed more friends.

This was the first time I had met this man. I was not about to make him a friend. Therefore he just excluded himself from the “free” category.

The truth about great writer is this. They are born, they are not made.

The best writers have lived lives others would not have survived and it is this torture which causes us to put our pen to the paper, or our fingertips to the keyboard.

We are haunted by the characters which constantly seek to use us to tell their story.

We need a house to live in, a car to drive and food to eat just like everyone else does. Some of us have children who need assistance with college.

So next time you think you are a writer when you have not written a word, or think that we can work for free and still provide for our families, do me a favor…

“GO JUMP IN A LAKE!”