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FOUL TERRITORY
Life As A Writer
by Sean Mullin
October 30, 2003

You wake up, put the coffee pot on, grab a hasty shower—although it might quite possibly be where you do your best thinking—get out, dress, have another cup of coffee, and sit down at your computer to begin the day’s work.  You’re meticulous and you’re a perfectionist.  You save everything constantly; that bad experience three years ago when you lost what may have been your finest work because Microsoft Word crashed is still permanently etched in your mind.  It amazes you when adults make juvenile mistakes in grammar, word choice, and punctuation and annoys you when they don’t care.  If you’re having a bad day on the job, you break for lunch; if everything’s going great, you scarf down a sandwich at your desk (if you’re lucky) and keep working.  Rhyme scheme and cadence are important to you.  You keep a notepad and something to write with on your night table just in case inspiration strikes you in the middle of the night.  You love The Catcher in the Rye.  You like Dickens even though he was incredibly verbose.  You type quickly and you’re amazingly accurate.  You like alliteration but think malapropisms suck.  All you need is a word processor and, in less than twenty minutes, you’ll have come up with something that’d sell snow to Eskimos if marketed properly.  Spelling counts!  One of your pet peeves is listening to a song on the radio that contains lyrics that make absolutely no sense.  Shakespeare is a god-like figure as far as you’re concerned.  It really bothers you that this article is all one big paragraph.  In fact, not only are you annotating this, you’ve probably second-guessed most of the words I’ve chosen thus far by now and are vexed by the stream of consciousness you’ve just red.  (You’ve just thought to yourself, “It’s not ‘red!’ It’s ‘read,’ you idiot!”)  You’re a writer.  It’s your life and you’re proud of it.

Sean Mullin is a freelance writer from Boston, Massachusetts and a lifelong Red Sox fan. 
He can be reached at seantherook@yahoo.com.