Write without pay, eh? What's that supposed to mean?

I have a bad habit. Well, I have a lot of bad habits, but the most injurious is starting not-even-that-ambitious projects and abandoning them after, on average, 4.2 hours.

I'm such a whiner. I'm like, "Yeah, I'm in sales. But I'm not a salesperson. I mean, what I really want to do is write. But that's a tough thing to do, you know?" The truth is, I haven't actually committed to writing since I left college. It frightens me to admit how long ago that was (sometimes I even wonder if my degree is valid. I think I owe the University of Iowa bookstore $300.) but I could have finished four novels in that time. Or four collections of poetry. Or 2,000 blog posts. 

But no more. My friend Jessy has returned to school, pausing her successful career to return to writing. To immerse herself in it and get better at it. To go back to writing every day. My friend Matt has an agent, for crying out loud. And what am I doing? Watching reruns of the original 90210 on Soap Net.

Mark Twain said "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for."

I think Mark Twain was very wise. And thus my plan. Write for three years. Write in a committed and invested way for three years. See what happens. Don't jump ship. Read a lot, write a lot, and talk about writing a lot.

Here goes.

Post script: I thought it worth adding that I have edited this first post something like eight times. This past edit, in which I changed the blog entry title (that's gotta be a blog faux pas, but considering I have five followers, I don't anticipate an uproar), I realized that my compulsive editing of one freaking blog entry is a symptom of my much larger problem: I can't ever finish anything because after completing one paragraph, I spend another hour editing that paragraph. I need to develop some kind of exercise to help me out of this habit.