This is roughly how much caffeine I have to drink to get motivated, some days.

Here’s the thing about writing: I never stop doing it and yet I have the darndest time trying to get myself to, you know, do it. I’m supposed to be working on my memoir, as we speak, at this very moment and during each of the moments that have been ticking away for hours now as I fiddle around on the interwebs, doing every, every, everything but. And I can tell you, I’ve got excuse-making down to an art.

“Of course I’m working. I just wrote a blog post for Salon. And here I am, on a writing-centric website, writing another blog post. And that’s writing, which is opening up the creative passageways for more writing, so it counts. Even if I do exactly that for the next however many hours until my fingers or my brain or my will to stay awake gives out, it’s writing. Right?”

Wrong, oh wayward brain of mine.

And that speaks to the two reasons I joined SheWrites this week: to get inspired by other writers to write more, write better, write more effectively and market the damn thing once it’s ready and to procrastinate doing all of those things. As a girl with a wicked sweet tooth, I know the power of reward.

From what I’ve seen so far, this little space could be a sweet little thing. Just the thing I need when I’ve got to bribe myself to finish that chapter, that graf, that line, that word. Or when I just need to pig out because it’s my day off and I deserve it, already.

Because sometimes writing is alchemy and sometimes it’s a coal mine. Here’s to living and loving through both.