In two days I will run my third marathon. Here’s my inner voice:

I’m not ready!! I didn’t run enough. I didn’t lose enough weight. I skipped track a couple of times. I didn’t push myself on long runs. I ate too many Cheese Nips at the aid stations. I should have eaten more protein and less fat. Have I been hydrating enough? Sleeping enough? Why didn’t I work harder?? Please, can I start again? I’ll do better next time!

Yeah, it’s not pretty. When your success or failure is measured by a digital readout on a timer as you cross the finish line, you’ve got one shot to make everything perfect, and it’s never perfect enough.

Frequently I write about how what I learn about running helps me with my life as a professional writer, but in this case, I should learn from my business experience. Writing for a living has no real finish line. All along the way I’m making adjustments, improvements, mistakes and achievements. Sure, I have big projects and deadlines, but the line for success is a lot more gray. If I get the project in on time and the client likes the results, I’m satisfied. I bet the prose can always be tighter, the words more precise, the verbs more vivid. But I’m not looking for a personal record every time I start a project. I’m more looking for overall improvement and a happy client.

I’ve not once stopped to scream… wait — I’ve eaten too much pizza! I can’t possibly succeed in this project! I have come to recognize that writing is a process, and the ideas, the precision, the talent all ebb and flow. That means I’m not always 100 percent prepared for a project or perfect with the final project… it means I’m constantly working toward a better goal and making progress. I need to view my running that way… Saturday’s marathon is simply one deadline in a lifelong quest to improve my fitness. My performance on this run has nothing to do with my self worth. If I get set a personal record, wonderful. If I don’t, I have a lifetime to keep improving (or at least until I grind my knees into powder).

I’ll try to keep this in mind for 26.2 miles, and I’ll try to stop my inner voice from drowning out the fun. Wish me luck!

There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

-Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

After my visit with a literary agent, I developed a clear idea of the book I want to write. I need to write a killer book proposal first, which means I need to build up my writing credentials to make it look like I’m the best person to write this book.

So I started a personal essay that I’m pitching to national women’s magazines. I’m thinking 1000-2000 words. Given that I write at least 500-2000 each day for clients, I figured I could just knock it out. After all, I just need to write my own experiences, right?

Holy crap was I wrong.

I already had about 800 words of another piece that I could use for a starting place. I went to a coffee shop Sunday to slam it out. One hour, two hours, three. The work just kept expanding. I returned home to keep working. Four hours. Five. After the sixth hour my eyes were blurry. My butt was numb. I wasn’t finished. And I was flabbergasted that writing my own stories was so difficult.

As a professional writer, I compose articles and marketing copy all the time. But now that I’ve been spending time writing my own stuff, I realize that I make my living more assembling the content than creating it. I interview people for profiles, so they provide their own content. I use facts about a company to write web pages, adding keywords from a list for search engine optimization. The chunks of information I need to do my job are either handed to me or fairly easy to gather.

But when it all comes from me, it takes more time than I ever imagined. I have to work to pull memories, struggle to capture them correctly, fight to find little details that will illustrate points. And I have to write it so that my voice comes out — which means I have to *find* my voice.

As a business person, I’m weighing the ROI per hour spent on different types of writing. The ROI on business writing is pretty darn good. I can easily write a 500-word press release in 1.5 hours and get paid in two weeks. The ROI on personal writing, be it fiction, nonfiction narrative or business book writing, seems to suck. I spent a good 15 hours total on 2000 words, and I haven’t come close to selling it (though I did get a “good” rejection already). It’ll probably take me weeks of research and waiting to find the market — at least another 5 hours of work. That’s 20 hours for 2000 words, with no guarantee that I’ll ever get paid.

Err. If I had studied accounting, the answer would be clear. Dang my nagging need to write for myself!

According to the Global Language Monitor, the word (phrase?) Web 2.0 became the millionth word of the English language today at 10:22 Stratford-on-Avon time. It barely beat out the “word” n00b, a classic from the gamer community, a disparaging term meaning a neophyte in game playing. Others in the top 15 for the race to 1,000,000,000 were Octomom, sexting, defriend and recessionista.

To defriend someone is to remove him from your list of contacts on MySpace, Facebook or other social networking sites. An ad campaign from Burger King asked people to defriend 10 people to receive a free Whopper. How can that really be a word? Recessionista is a portmanteau of recession and fashionista, meaning someone who strives to dress chic even though she’s broke. When the economy gets going again, this word should disappear. So why does it need to go into our permanent collection?

The Global Language Monitor says it has rules for determining when a word really becomes legitimate enough for the collection. It has to appear at least 25,000 times in a variety of geographic locations and media. The man behind the project said a word is created about once every 98 minutes.

As a professional writer, my first response is argh! These made up words and language additions drive me insane. Do you realize how long it takes to dig to find if Octomom has to be capitalized or hyphenated? For gosh sake’s… did you see that n00b uses zeros? How the heck am I supposed to know that?

This brings up the question of finding the 2009 ultimate style guide. The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has, give or take, about a quarter of a million words and definitions. The edgy, off-color Urban Dictionary claims to have 4,032,262 definitions written since 1999. The word of the day today is beat feet, which means to leave a selected area, as in “My bitter ex-girlfriend showed up at the party I was at, so Jeff gave me a heads up and I beat feet.” Or should we rely on the Coffee house fact finders who post to Wikipedia? The Associated Press Stylebook just doesn’t help at times like these.

Here’s the top 16 near 1,000,000,000:

• 1,000,000: Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
• 999,999: Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
• 999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
• 999,997: Slumdog – a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.
• 999,996: Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.
• 999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.
• 999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
• 999,993: Octomom – The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.
• 999,992: Greenwashing – Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.
• 999,991: Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
• 999,990: Shovel Ready – Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds.
• 999,989: Defriend – Social networking terminology for cutting the connection with a formal friend.
• 999,988: Chengguan – Urban management officers, a cross between mayors, sheriff, and city managers.
• 999,987: Recessionista – Fashion conscious who use the global economic restructuring to their financial benefit.
• 999,986: Zombie Banks – Banks that would be dead if not for government intervention and cash infusion.
• 1,000,001: Financial Tsunami – The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months