Snipe Hunting for Writers

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve wanted to be a writer. For years, I’d daydream and talk about writing, but it was fantasy. It took a dash of midlife angst to make me, the Writer, a reality. In the last two years, I started writing for this blog and finished the first draft of a novel. It feels like I’m getting close to something. Or at the very least, I’m in the process of becoming something.

I used to imagine myself as a writer, hunched over a little wooden desk, pen gripped tightly in hand, sweating out each and every word. The floor would be littered with crumpled up paper. Perhaps I’d even be a little self-destructive and there would be an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts or a bottle of Glenlivet whiskey stashed in my bottom desk drawer. My mental picture was always an odd combination of…