- You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.
- You can’t live with the level of clean that your family accepts as normal.
- You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.
- You haven’t made yourself a writing space.
- You haven’t realized that you need help.
- You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.
- You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.
- You think that someday you will have more time for writing.
- You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.
- You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.
- You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.
- You are too busy criticizing the best selling books that you are reading to write something better.
- You don’t know what to do with a blank page.
- You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.
- You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.
- You need to do a little planning and research before you start.
- You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)
- You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.
- You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
- You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20 minute chunks you actually have.
- You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.
Author
My name is pronounced "Metty" like my mother's "Betty." It is Danish, and we were all named after ancestors. I guess by the time they got to number nine (out of eleven), it was getting tricky. So I got the funny Danish name no one knew how to prounounce. In Denmark, it should be "meta" like "metaphysical." It's from the Greek for "pearl." And no, it's not short for anything. Not even Mediterannean. My first book, THE MONSTER IN ME was accepted for publication in 1999 and was published in 2002. My second book, MIRA, MIRROR was published in 2004. The latest book, THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND, was published in 2007. A sequel, THE PRINCESS AND THE BEAR, came out in April of 2009. I now live in Utah with my husband and 5 children, ages 5 to 14. I write during nap time, or at 4 in the morning, or while the broccoli for dinner is burning. Whenever I get a chance. I love to write the kind of books that I love to read. And I love to discover what is going to happen next, just like a reader would. I also do some racing in triathlon. from http://www.metteivieharrison.com/myli...
