Writing from Hobby to Career--Part I

Twitter is full of writers feeling guilty for not writing.  In the evenings.  Over weekends.  On vacation.

Lots of people in more traditional jobs work from home on evenings/weekends/vacations.  Does your career commonly have the "I should always be working" guilt that writing has for many authors?

I have a hypothesis about why so many writers feel this way.

Most of us start writing as a "hobby" before we go pro.  We write late at night, after our families are asleep.  Or we wake early to write in the pre-dawn quiet.  We might borrow thirty minutes of our lunch breaks at work.  Grab the opportunity provided by waiting in the car-rider pick-up line at school.  We plot during exercise.  Draft during kids' TV shows.  Edit aloud in the shower.

And most authors never fully leave that space.  Many keep a "day" job until they retire.  But, even if an author is fortunate enough to be able to chose to make writing their only job, the mentality of writing fitting into every free moment, every liminal space, every unstructured corner of our lives is hard to lose.

Our practice of writing is from its inception entwined with borrowed, stolen, and found moments.