The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time. Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot. Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week.
I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group. Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday. I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare. I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run. And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating.
This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined. One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful. They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only. Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going.
The second one was about an hour away. They also met on Saturdays. Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. I couldn’t afford lunch out much, at the time, and after attending two meetings where nobody spoke to me at all, I gave up.
This most recent group is friendly enough. It’s actually the smallest of the three. The meetings are hybrid, though, meaning you don’t meet too many people face-to-face. And their meetings go all day (well, from ten to three, but that’s all day in my book).
I’m serious about my writing. I’ve had six books and over thirty short stories published. And I love to talk to other writers. Why is this so difficult? It’s, as they say, the working life.
Since the pandemic, many of us who work remotely have found ourselves expected to put more time into our day jobs. As if the man is offering you something special by permitting work from home. Even if you put in more hours and don’t arrive exhausted from the commute. It’s their pound of flesh.
Am I the only one that believes the three-day weekend ought to be the norm? At least then I’d be able to attend writing groups once a month, even if they take up the whole day.
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