Confession: I wrote a novel.

Confession the Sequel: I hate it.

Wait. Let me start over.

Few things were more satisfying, as a person who writes, than completing this novel. After months of writing during every free moment, and well into the night, I hit a 67k word count, typed up an Epilogue, emailed it to my sisters who served as beta readers, got a notebook full of praise in the form of smiley faces and points of ( v a s t ) improvement back, sat down to revise it, and thought, “Ugh. I’m bored with this.”

On one hand, I love writing. Often I will have a thought or a memory and start composing it in my mind. I think like a writer. Impeccable grammar comes easily to me. I’m good at subject/verb agreement. Once or twice I’ve even felt eloquent. Sometimes I get the notion that I just might get paid for it.

And that’s the other hand.

I don’t write for the craft of it. Well, I do, because I can’t help myself, but then I also really want to make some money doing it. I want someone to decide that my writing is tight enough to pay money just to read what I have to say and how I say it.

That, and I spend entirely too much time and money at Target.

I write.

A lot.

I have a dozen stories in my head that sound good until I start writing one. I get as far as the outline and character descriptions before I decide that it will be crap. I can’t commit myself to any one of them, because then I get bored, and I don’t have patience to see one through to the end. I jump around. I write the same line over and over again. I overuse favorite words. I don’t want to tack my name to something, because what if it’s crap? Then I will be a crappy writer, and all my friends will know it.

I can’t help it. If I don’t try, then I can never say that I failed at being a writer.

Then again, I also won’t be making some bucks.