The Solitary Writer and a Cylical Life

Being a writer can be a lonely job. Especially a novelist.

For hours, sometimes days, the novel writer sits alone, without human contact, staring at a computer screen, sometimes drinking coffee, other times drinking alcohol, thinking about fictional characters doing made up things in made up worlds.

It can be quite isolating. And it can lead to social problems - some of the most brilliant novelists out there are also the most eccentric (and, without much surprise, are most prone to substance abuse). Who out there hasn't heard of an alcoholic writer? Quite a few writers drink when they write. "It opens the creative mind," they claim. Or maybe it's just because they like to drink?

Beer chugging novelists aside, what I really have been thinking about is how life tends to be present itself in cycles - our economy rises and falls in cycles, we leave school, leave home, enter the workforce, and then return home and return to school in another cycle. We are born, mature, grow older, and die in yet another cycle.

The latest cycle presented to me was an email that I received this week. A literary agency in New York would like to read a few pages from my first novel, Ashes, which I have been shopping for a few years now. My heart racing with excitement, I call just about everyone I can. The general consensus is to rewrite the beginning that evening.

So, I spend that subsequent evening writing a new scene - and a new synopsis. And now...after working on several other novels, other projects have been suspended to work on my first novel once again. The cycle continues.

And now I am dressing up my first manuscript - the one that I thought I had put away - changing the suit I dressed it in last year to a tuxedo - in hopes that the email or phone call will come with more interest in my work.

My fight for a career in novel writing has continued; it has taken a step forward...I just might be one step closer to that isolating life of a novelist.

Or, at the very least, my first novel now has a great new beginning!