Lately I've been sending my non-writer friends a few links to articles about those of us in the writing trade and our psychological peculiarities. Not the most flattering articles, but entertaining, and supporting that image of authorial eccentricity that makes our generally unglamorous lives look a bit more interesting (and often gets us off the hook for some of our less sterling behavior).

One is J. Robert Lennon's essay, "The Truth About Writers," in the LA Times, in which he keeps track of what he's really doing when he says he's writing and discovers just how little "writing time" is spent actually writing. (He doesn't list reading articles online about how writers waste their time, which is now high on my list.) What I like best is how even after he cops to the vast amounts of wasted time, he comes back in the end to that old, foolproof fallback of the defensive writer: "But I am writing! Even if I don't look like I am!"

The other is the cautionary tale of Alice Hoffman. Surely all of us here have heard it and probably talked more about it than we wanted to, but I've found it interesting to consider in the light of Lennon's column. If you haven't read enough about it, Gawker ran entertaining (if snotty) pieces on Ms. Hoffman's initial rampage and her subsequent effort at an apology. There's no question that her behavior was egregious, but I do understand all too well the feelings that led to it. Remembering a few of my own ill-considered eruptions of bile on Facebook and Twitter and Blogger, I find myself thinking, "There but for the grace of God—or a tiny bit more self-control—go I."

Both the Lennon piece and the Hoffman story illustrate two of the dangers of this line of work: we spent too much time on the computer (and have too many rationalizations for why we should be hopping on and off the web instead of focusing on our work); and we spend way, way too much time inside our own heads.