It's a funny thing this business of writing, if the highs weren't so high, the lows wouldn't be so low.

It's a well established fact that Writers have one of the highest levels of mental illness of any profession, even Actors.  Though actors have the abiliity to behave badly and be forgiven because they're the beautiful people.  Writer's tend to look like anybody else, so we're fair game.  Add to that long periods of frustrating solitude, a fondness for alcohol in gratuitous quantities and a fondness for firearms (not for everybody I know) and you've sort of got a recipe for disaster.

My advice is get help when you need it.  The therapist's couch is not an evil place but it can be a safe place to battle some of the nastier demons that live between your ears.  Do it for you and forget about everbody else and their hang ups about you talking to a shrink.  It bugged the shit out of my family when I started talking to a psychologist but that was their problem not mine.  Not to mention a little self centered on their part unless they saw my sessions as an admission of weakness (I'm from a Scottish family).  Truth be told, I wasn't dealing with the death of my son too well or any of the other terrible things going on with my family at the time and it was creeping out in flashbacks (something I didn't believe in before I started having them) and explosions of extreme rage.  As both of those states are dangerous to myself and to others I got the help I needed.  Therapy taught me how to deal with things in a positive and non self injurious way and for that I'm grateful.

Other little tricks are eat well, get enough sleep and keep the booze to a minimum.

Anyway, enough of this morbid shit.  I'm working on a few things right now, finishing up a spec, outlining another supernatural thriller and beginning the layout for a TV project.

So now ACTRA and CPTFA just have to pul their collective fingers out and get my wife back to work and everything in the world will be good again.