I went home to get my car.
Now, I’m back at the office.
While at home, I got to watch Oprah.
The episode was a compilation of quotes / interviews of the different authors she featured in her Book Of the Month Club.
The authors talked about what inspired them, how they worked, and what they felt whenever they finished a book. Most of them said that they ended up crying as they sent the manuscript to their publisher. One of them said it was like the end of a bad relationship. Another one said, it was like saying goodbye to very good friends. While another said, that after she finishes a book, the characters never really go away, that they linger around and stay with you for a while.
Oprah has a special segment for authors who were also mothers and they talked about how they had to find a way to keep writing while fulfilling their role as mother, how they learned to work either early in the morning or late at night, or how they just had to write during the in-between hours while their kids and husbands were away.
One of the authors quotes some statistic that supposedly said there are several hundred thousand published authors in the United States and that only 200 of them actually make a living out of writing. Which means, for thousands of authors out there, they have to keep a job or two so they can afford to keep writing.
And I think every author interviewed said that they wouldn’t know what else to do aside from write. One said that her soul would just shrivel up if she couldn’t write anymore. Another one said that she would probably keep on writing even if she never gets another story published, that she would just keep on writing for herself—for her characters.
Through out the show, I just kept nodding my head in approval, because in a certain way I understood what they were talking about, and at the same time I felt this pain inside of me, because I envied their passion for writing and their stories of how it felt to write the last chapter of a book and type “The End”.
I’m back at work because I need to come up with a name for this new product that’s supposed to change you life… well, not really, but the it’s supposed to make you feel that way. I’m back at work because I need to write a script that will make you feel like you need to have a cellphone… but you don’t really need it.
I’m back at work… when I’d rather be writing my stories.