FILL: You might be a writer if . . .

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Just for the fun of it

Writer's Digest, August 2004, page 16, suggests that you might be a writer if:

1. You include an SASE with all correspondence -- even letters to your mother.
2. You can't resist pointing out grammatical errors in restaurant menus.
3. Your wife says she'll kill you if you whisper, "That was the end of the first act" during a movie one more time.
4. You can recite return postage rates for London, New York, Los Angeles and Guam.
5. In a house fire, you'd save your copy of Writer's Market, then your grandmother's jewelry.
6. During church sermons, you find yourself thinking, this could be tighter.
7. You couldn't balance a checkbook if your life depended on it, but your submission log is cross-referenced three different ways and goes back to 1986.
8. You decide four sentences into any novel that the author is inept.
9. You fall in love based on proper use of syntax.
10. When your family suggests a Disney World vacation, you say, "How about stopping on the way to see the farmhouse where Walt Whitman was born?"
11. You feel sex ranks a distant second to the sensation of holding a felt-tip pen in your hand.
12. Your answering machine says, "Hi, I'm not here right now. Please leave a query and a synopsis of your proposed message, and I'll let you know whether to call back."
13. When you nail a sentence, you're pretty sure you know how Moses felt parting the Red Sea.

So what's your favorite expression of the writing life? You might be a writer if . . .

Finish that phrase. Come on, you know you want to. You might be a writer if . . .