LOL!
*rushes off to buy it*
Are writer's so different? Must we claim monopoly on the tortured soul?
I would probably say yes, being the old romantic that I am.
Wow. Powerful quote.
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure the line that offended you was satire.
Worthwhile things are hard.
This (while, perhaps, acknowledging that it's only human to complain – and, dare I say it, often
Isn't this always the target?
In other words, I'm a writer. 
Loneliness, yes. Some can use it for good, some can escape it when it isn't being good for them. Some don't know how. This poor fellow was apparently a nuisance, a liability to other folk and that was probably at least part of his problem, even before social mmmmeeeeejiaaa.
The Hermit is a wonderful archetype and stands for the sign of Virgo too. There is a bit of Hermit in me, Virgo rising. If a client wants to know when something seems most likely to happen and I draw the Hermit, we're looking at a likelihood of late August -late September. Likelihood. I don't deal in prediction, only forecasting. I know nothing, I don't know. I only say what I see when I sit down to look and I don't always want to...see or say. But that's me job, no one made me do it and it is a great privilege, reading for the people who come through the door or over Skype etc. I hear many fascinating things, and often very moving things.
Owls apart from just being spectacular, fascinating birds are symbolically are messengers of Hecate. There is no card as such, though owls do feature in some decks. Sometimes The High priestess is shown with an owl, as here in 'The Legacy of The Divine Tarot', illustrated by Ciro Marchetti. (warning: lengthy Youtube presentation of all 78 images.)
It's a thriving publishing industry in its own right. The Hermit looks very different in this deck...tired but rather glamorous
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You sure are a writer. Thanks for your post.I've been debating whether to comment on the blog post because I've said so many things on this very subject countless times on here. But what the heck. I'm in a mood to post.
If you're not writing for the sake of the craft - for the love of it, because you have to, because it's your passion, because the voices in your head won't shut up, because it feeds your soul, or for any reason related to that, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
Writing to "succeed" at it - whatever that means - puts it on par with going after a high-paying job in a lucrative field. Stiff competition, long hours, usually some schmoozing with others in the industry, maybe a bit of back stabbing in private, and generally selling yourself, whether you're the best person for the job or not.
Yeah. Okay. That shit goes on out there in the writing world. We all know it does. We can all point toward best sellers that are not well-written books. We can all point toward classics that wouldn't get past an agent in today's industry because people wrote differently 100 years ago. 50 years ago. 25 years ago. We can all point toward shady dealings where authors manipulated numbers on Amazon to reach the rankings they did. If there's a way to exploit something, humans will find it and use it.
However...
There are legit authors making boatloads of money without any of the underhanded stuff that goes on. They write well. They have a solid following. Human nature being what it is, and this business being subjective, no matter how many books one sells, not everyone adores those authors. So what? Do you think they care? Hint: they don't. They aren't writing for the people who don't care for their work. They're writing for their fans and for themselves. But they wrote for themselves first. It's easy to lose sight of that fact.
We all know the stories of J.K. Rowling's and Stephen King's humble beginnings. They didn't know they'd be world famous. They simply wrote the stories they had to write. Every writer started out that way. Writing because they had a story to tell.
Sure, some people (a lot of them, actually) had pie-in-the-sky dreams of hitting the NYT best sellers list their first time out, and becoming an instant overnight success with movie deals and merchandising rights. The smart ones quickly realized we all have those dreams starting out, but rarely does that happen in real life. And they kept writing anyway because of the reasons listed up there in the second paragraph of this post. And they were happy doing it because they write to write. Not to become someone else's ideal of successful.
So it comes down to how you define successful.
If you define it like the author of the blog post, you will never be happy doing this. You will never be happy writing for the sake of writing.
Personally, I had dreams, too. I also had unrealistic expectations about the publishing industry. Coming to this forum - in its former manifestation and again in this one - helped ground me in reality. It also taught me my own limitations as a writer. And of course we all have those. But not all of us can see them or are willing to acknowledge them. Doesn't mean I won't stop trying to write a better book each time, but I'm also enough of a realist to know my own limits in terms of the craft.
So I had to make a decision. Keep doing this for the wrong reasons and continue to fail at that, or do it for the reasons I've been doing it since I was eight years old. Because I love to write stories. I love to create worlds. I love to create characters. This is my passion.
Am I saying I've settled? I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes I believe I have. But mostly I believe I'm in a comfortable place with my writing career, where once in a while I turn a phrase that surprises even me. Where once in a while a story comes to me so strongly and so completely that to *not* write it would be akin to cutting off an arm.
Am I tortured soul? God, I hope not. I'm just a wife and mother, a nurse, a wannabe percussion player, a wannabe cello player, a dabbler in things like Tarot cards and balancing my chakras, who wishes she had WAY more time in life to do all the cool things she still has yet to do.
