BooksChatter: ✉ Balancing Life and Writing

Today author MF Sullivan takes over our blog to tell us about "Balancing Life and Writing".

Her latest novel is The Hierophant's Daughter (19 May 2019, Painted Blind Publishing, 267 pages), a Cyberpunk LGBTQ Horror, book one in The Disgraced Martyr Trilogy.

5 Stars: "General Dominia is a powerful centerpiece to a thrilling, horrific and tense adventure where the fate of humanity is at stake...fans of futuristic horror and cogent dystopias are certain to enjoy The Hierophant's Daughter as much as I did." -Readers' Favorite Book Reviews

"The Hierophant's Daughter is a gripping read from start to finish. I highly recommend it." -Tessa Dick, author of Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright & Conversations With Philip K. Dick

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Balancing Life and Writing

by M.F. Sullivan

Walter Mosley

When I was sixteen, my English teacher submitted some of my work for a grant which allowed a few lucky students to attend Columbus State Writers Conference for free. The great African American detective writer Walter Mosley was the keynote speaker that year, there promoting not his noirs but his then-new book on writing. The advice he told the audience altered my entire brain in those moments.

“Let the paint peel off the walls and the dishes pile up,” he said. “When you have a great idea, you sit down with it and get it out. Don’t let anybody stop you. That other stuff can wait until your novel is finished. Tell your friends they can see you when you’re done.”

I was lucky in my childhood to be surrounded by extremely supportive people, but nobody had ever told me something like this. Practicality was the key when it came to considering a career as an adult—it was nice that I was a writer, and all, but there was a definite, subtle push to something more sustainable. This idea that, yes, I could be a writer, as long as I had my other priorities in order, first.

Charles Bukowski

But Walter Moseley flipped my perspective on that. After the two-day conference I was electrified; and not long after that I discovered Charles Bukowski, who, a destitute factotum blown from squalid room to squalid room, wrote his way through hell, was forced by circumstance to stop, then picked it up again when given money and opportunity enough to write his first great novel, Post Office.

There’s a book for the working man! I read it a thousand times while working full-time. In those pages, like in Moseley’s words, I found permission to write no matter what was happening around me. Eventually, years of daily writing later, I have come to the conclusion that writers are, naturally, nothing if they are not writing. Birds must fly, fish must swim, writers have to write. My secret was not discovering a life/writing balance. My secret was flipping Maslow’s pyramid of needs upside-down, so, like a precarious top, my sense of well-being is tied directly to the structure’s tip: the status of my writing.

Unhealthy, you say? Perhaps—but it’s worth noting that the daily practice of writing teaches us other, far more constructive habits. When you learn to write every day, you learn to clean every day, to make your bed every day, to walk or exercise every day, to read every day—sometimes, as in my case while writing The Disgraced Martyr Trilogy, you even learn to pray or meditate every day. One wholesome habit, crystalized, brings hundreds more into relief.

Writing is a curative for not just the modern condition, but the eternal nous which is man’s higher mind: and this shows in the body, and the life it lives. Every book, every flawed character in need of catharsis, teaches us a little more how to improve ourselves—and we learn that if we expect nothing short of perfection from our stories, we should expect nothing short of perfection from our lives.

Race through the bloodbath in this first volume of a horrific cyberpunk tahgmahr you can't afford to miss. What would you sacrifice to survive?