The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer

Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? (Rarely in the same currency)

What is my writing for? I need to answer this honestly. Sometimes I tell myself it's a drum, a kettledrum pounding in my head. The act of transferring that from my mind onto the paper or screen. That answer used to satisfy me, but it doesn't anymore.

For there's a cost to the body and relationships by turning the inside of your head into sentences every single day. If you've ever wondered what it would actually take to do this for real then I'll try to provide something useful here, or at least some good company.

I apologize for the sheer amount of navel-gazing in this blog post. If you aren't interested in metablogging and an author talking out loud while holding up a mirror, then I joyously recommend you skip this one for the sake of your own sanity.

I've answered the question "why do I write?" before in detail, sure, but I haven't really answered the questions "how do I write?" and "what do I hope my writing will do?" The honest version is duller than any romantic myth about writers. The honest version took me longer to find than I expected, and it isn't the answer I started with.

I think we need to take a step back and first answer the question "*what* are you writing on this blog, anyways?" It's a maximalist's frenzied manic dream. I do not have separate blogs for separate things, everything homesteads here.

There's the technical guides and tutorials for building your own site and blog, the polemic political manifestos, the cultural criticism and media analysis, the personal lyric essay and often my writing does not sit in one particular category but is a hybrid of the above. Too many rooms and liminal hallway logic. I'm elbow-deep in benchmarks and I'm furious about the political reality of the world. I review poetry about patrilineal damage and analyze Cree tricksters. A layman's scientific study of human society, social relationships, and institutions. Most days I don't walk between these rooms so much as fall through the floor of one and land in another, mid-sentence.

## Labels

Okay, maybe it would be easier to answer *"what do you call yourself?"* If we're specifically talking about the writing aspect, then I am a blogger, but what does that mean? I guess I could also say that I'm a cultural commentator, a creative nonfiction writer, an independent author.

Officially, in the eyes of the Canadian government, the Statistics Canada's National Occupational Classification does have a slot for me. [**NOC 51111, "Authors and writers (except technical)**](https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3VD.pl?Function=getVD&TVD=1322554&CVD=1322870&CPV=51111&CST