I never thought Iwould ever say this, but for the first time in months, I am worried about losing my job.

Actually, I care more about my losing stable income than I do about being out of work, which is a problem in and of it itself. I should care more about my work than the money.

I suppose it's the thought of having no monthly income and yet still have monthly bills that frightens me. I have to pay for my insurance policy, the phone bill, and money for other monthly damages: petrol, net cards, and developing and film charges. Batteries.

Unless I find a stable job by March, I will be spending most of the money I earned the previous year (which amounts to pennies, if you look at it) which means I will be without any savings.

I have to figure out a way to earn more money, and at the same time look for a stable writing job. I'm hoping to snag something up that's in conjunction with the elections, since I like political writing, but I don't know how well that would turn out considering that I have no solid writing background to begin with.

I need a few pieces to fall back on, and it's getting that done that's scaring me. As a writer, your greatest fear is being rejected. Your biggest challenge is not the writing itself, but the fear of being judged through what you have just passionately wrote.

I think it's bullshit when people say critic a persons story and expect the writer to never be offended. To disassociate themselves from their work and view it like it was just business.

You can't do that.

All writing is personal. It's never purely just business. You send out a part of yourself every time you write something, so a critisism of a piece is akin to tearing a small portion of a writers soul to pieces. You can never escape it, merely accept it, and that's what you call professionalism.

I think writers workshops are the worse critics, professional critics come second. Writers the lot of them, both equally ruthless. You can't blame them though. Writers, by nature, are moody and snobbish. They have egos bigger than the Goodyear blimp, and I say this as a writer.

This is because every time you come across a piece of writing, there is this tiny writer person inside of you that's forever comparing the current work in your hands with your own.

It can either suck or be better, it doesn't matter. There will always be this tiny bit of comparison with yourself, along with the silent words of "I could have done better".

It doesn't even matter if you were born not a writer but just a literary critic (with the PhD to boot) you undoubtedly are clinging to some sort of frustration to not have the writing pen in hand and just unleash all pent up emotion in a very heatedly opinionated column or debate.

Bah well. Maybe the saying is true: "Everybody's a critic".