Making decisions and being a grown up

I'm back from my holiday and had a lovely relaxing time, thanks for asking. But I always feel that holidays are a brilliant time to think, away from all the usual distractions of life. I still maintain that I do some of my best thinking when lying on a sunbed with my Che Guevara hat on. And this holiday was no different, some quality thinking was squeezed in between the beers and sunbathing.

As regular readers will know I have struggled in the past to think of myself as a writer. It's the one thing I really want to do yet I find it hard to consider myself as a writer. Writers are people apart from me; different; special; touched by genius. How do I compete with the mental image I have of a writer? This mythical person is nothing like me and I will probably never be like that. Hell, I'll definitely never be like that! So there's my dilemma, I don't fit my mental picture of a writer therefore I can't be one, right?

Wrong!

All my thinking has changed my mind-set. Writer's are just people like me. Sure, some are touched by genius and are special but most are regular folk like me. Maybe not as flakey but normal-ish. So I can be a writer because I am just like a writer - a regular person who writes. I've decide that I am going to be a writer so therefore I am one - I think that's what I mean?

I read a couple of e-books while I was away to review and it struck me while reading them that they were the kind of thing I could have written. It was a real lightbulb moment; here was an ordinary person doing what I wanted to do and I was reading, enjoying and planning to review what they had written. If they could do it, why not me? And how awesome would it be if next year someone was reading my story while on holiday?

So I decided then and there that I am going to make writing my 'job'. I'm going to sit myself down everyday, get this first draft written and stop prevaricating about it. I'm going to act like a writer and stop faffing around bemoaning the fact that I'm not 'being a writer'. After all, what do all those writers have that I don't? Nothing, except the motivation to get it done. And now I've got that, I may be unstoppable ...