Being a professional writer means being a writer.
In an underrated, classic starring Billy Crystal and Danny Devito, called Throw Momma From the Train, Crystal’s character is a writing class instructor. He says, “A writer writes. Always.”
Always Writing
What Crystal means in the movie is that as a writer you should always be writing. I’d go a step further and say, as a natural writer, you can’t stop writing.
I’m often writing in my head. Sometimes it’s nothing more that narrating something that happened to me. Often, it is some fantasy scene playing out in my head. Other times, it’s writing an article for publication.
The catch to always writing is that you always need places to put your writing. As a result, I have numerous websites. Some of those websites make money for me. Some of those websites are just informational, and some of those websites are just places to allow my creativity to spill out onto the page. The only way to truly stop writing something in your head is to write it, for real, in the real world.
Once upon a time, I had a website called brianenelson.com. I have this website because BrianNelson.com was already taken. The idea was that this website would be the “me” website. A place where I could dump my ideas and thoughts, and blathering on. All of which would be pre-written in my head.
I took it down after worrying that specifying my middle initial was too person and might lead to identity theft. Ironically, finding my middle initial is probably the least difficult piece of data to track down about me.
A New Place for Personal
What all of these words are getting at is that I’m debating whether this Brian Nelson website is where I want to put “me” even though it has the .pro extension, or if I want to pull my other Brian Nelson information website out of mothballs and make that the “me” website.
Honestly, either one makes sense. I could contain my pro stuff to my Colorado-based freelance writing website and then use this as a “Yes, I’m a professional, but I also do all of this stuff everyday,” website. A lot of the “me” can be diverted to other websites I already run like, my parenting website which I use both as an outlet for all things parenting, as well as a money earning website with parental information and keywords.
Or, I could keep this as my “me, but professional,” website. I could talk about computing conferences I attend, and things I do as a professional, like training, writing, and glitches in programming and website design, while keeping the me things like weight loss, cancer and getting healthier on my other non-pro website.
Anyway, welcome to my brain dump. I’ll keep you posted either way.
I’m a writer.
I write.
Always.
(And, now I also go find stock photography, build links, choose categories and tags, and fill out meta data – An online writer links. Always 🙂