Why am I doing this again??

Ever been working on something for months, writing, researching, struggling with it because, dammit, you just know you can make it work, but every attempt seems to just be... wrong. It's stiff, unnatural, refuses to flow no matter how you try to rewrite it, no matter how many different angles you try to approach it from, and your deadline is looming closer and closer, and you start getting desperate, because you don't want to ask for an extension, you know you can do this but... AARRRGGHHH!!!

Then life seems to throw all these obstacles and blocks your way, keeping you from working on it, until finally, it slams into you with all the force of a speeding train... you're writing about the wrong characters. It's not a story about this person... it's a story about those two people. And suddenly, everything flows the way it is supposed to, your fingers are flying across the keyboard, it's so easy to write now, whereas before, it was like trying to slog through mud uphill in a torrential downpour with a 150 pound pack on your back.

Serious, that drives me nuts. And it drives the people around me nuts, too.

I hate being a writer.

But then, sometimes, it just comes so easy, words seem to flow from my fingertips, and I can literally see the story before my eyes, like my own little movie and I'm just taking notes, really. The characters speak to me, leaning over my shoulder and whispering suggestions as I write, making me laugh at highly inappropriate moments when I suddenly realize why a certain thing needs to happen in the process of a story, or almost making me cry when I realize someone has to die and why. Sometimes, I feel like I am just a medium through which the story comes, the conduit that brings it to life on paper, because it can't stay in my head or it hurts, like they're drumming against the inside of my skull, trying to escape, and I can only relieve that pain by writing them out of me, and it feels so good, so good when it all works, when it comes together and it works and I know it works, there it is, see?

I love being a writer.

And this is why the Muggles think writers are crazy. And maybe we are. But who cares, as long as it makes a good story?