Elf Sternberg

Which is why I believe the phrase "the writing life" should not exist. I don't know who came up with this treacly trope, so redolent of cats on the lap and tea steaming in the mug... Writing, however, is not life. It's not even very much fun. It's like standing in a dark cave with an entire colony of Mexican fruit bats and trying to catch them with a butterfly net. They're zooming here and swooping there; they're smacking you with their wings. They're getting tangled in your hair, they probably have rabies, and they want to suck your blood, but you just keep swinging the net over and over and over, and yet the net remains empty. If, wonder of wonders, you do catch a bat, you will bask blissfully in the knowledge that you have netted the most perfect specimen of Chiroptera ever known. You'll bask for exactly five minutes... Then you realize your bat does, in fact, suck. Then you realize your bat is actually a fine, fine bat but the problem is that the world doesn't actually need any more bats, so maybe you should just put down the net and take up needlepoint. Of course, if there's anything worse than a writer preening about writing, it's a writer bitching about writing, which is why I believe writers really just shouldn't talk at all.