There are some out there who are fortunate enough to have the luxury of getting paid to do what they love; to write. The rest of us have the get by, squeezing in minutes of writing time between school, work, personal relationships, second jobs even.

Like many writers who struggle to keep up a writing practice between the doldrums of daily life, I have spent hours scouring Pinterest for blog posts on how to keep up a lively, productive writing routine. I typically skim through these blog posts searching for the bolded and bulleted phrases. In my mind, I’m too busy to be reading long, in-depth articles with helpful tips and relatable anecdotes. You know. With all of the not-writing I'm doing.

So here’s another relatable anecdote for you to skip over: I currently don’t have a writing practice.

Writing About Problems You Don't Have the Answers To

This week, I started listening to the Dear Hank and John podcast while working on shelf reading at the library. One of the many perks of being a circulation assistant at my library is that we are allowed to listen to music while we’re in the stacks, but I learned quickly, however, that it takes all the power in my being not to laugh out loud while listening to the vlogbrothers give their typical dubious advice in response to typically hilarious questions.

If you’re not a John Green fan, you might not know of the podcast he hosts with his brother Hank Green, or that John is in fact in the process of writing a new book. An avid vlogbrothers follower, I was psyched to hear John read an excerpt aloud from it some months back during the Project for Awesome livestream, and to find that the new novel John has been laboring so hard over is on a subject very close to home for him; living with OCD.