Randomness

I said this recently, but I'll say it again here. Writing is hard - hard to coax the words out, hard to put them into some kind of order on the screen, to not use the same word repititiously, to find some new angle, a new light, to an old scene. Or to properly set up those between canon moments that live in my head. Hard to slip into a character's head, and sometimes hard to jump back out again. If I had a free hour or two, I swear I'd spend the time surfing flists and comms, instead of working the word doc WIP I've opened up. Other times I've got a little elbow digging into my thigh, and my husband nudging me every two seconds because The Man Show just did another funny skit -

-and the characters are speaking right then.

I wonder if this is what it means to be an artist. I never considered myself one before, there's such pretention down that road, but what if I am? Because why else would I be driven to write? Is that the difference, when you're driven to do it?

I've been writing, in one form or another, since I was twelve. So even though I've never been published, or even close to it, does that make me a writer?

Or is this still something I do instead of scrapbooking or backpacking?