Great to meet you, Bill! Yes, it is very isolating. It’s one of the reasons I love blogging. I get to hear from you guys, your opinions, what’s going on in YOUR lives. Thanks so much for commenting and hope to see you on here more often. Working to get my tail in gear blogging more often now that the schedule has eased up a little bit. ((HUGS))

Your posts continue to make me smile, and not take what I do so seriously. And of course, make me want to get up in the morning and write a screenplay, novel, or some other fantasy 🙂

As you know, professional writing is an isolating way to make a living.
Best, Bill Stoller

Sometimes I feel bad about how little I manage to produce compared to writers of the past, and then I remember – THEY HAD STAFF! (Or at least a full-time housewife.) No one thinks Dickens was cooking his own dinner, or P.G. Wodehouse doing his own laundry. Even Jane Austen’s household included servants.

That’s the really weird thing about the modern model of work: it is built on the assumption that you have at least one person running your household (cooking, cleaning, childcare…) for you, and yet for how many people is that actually true? How many workers have staff or even a full-time house-spouse? And yet it all carries on like of course you have no responsibilities outside of your job… Madness!

Recently, I have suffered a number of setbacks and faced a total crisis on my writing career. As recently as last night, I was ready to throw in the towel. Something happened this morning (a lengthy freewriting sprint, I think), which helped me re-align my perspective.

The long and short of it is that a lack of qualifications and money has severely stunted my writing life as a whole. I also wanted to work in a French-speaking job, but the same problem affects me there. Nothing I can do about that, but it does mean that I cannot devote as much time to professional writing or foreign languages without a secure income. I had to just accept that, particularly after I found out about the “Sunken Cost” Fallacy.

(A.k.a, I have a whole load of language books on my shelf, and felt it would be a monumental waste not to spend hours studying them, even though the benefits would be minimal).

I also have suffered from the same problem of wanting to excel in a million different professions. That beign said, I do take inspiration from the value of dabbling in different genres. For me, it has been fanfiction (though I am suffering right now, as it becomes painfully apparent that my storytelling skills are nonexistent), and nonfiction articles.

Speaking of articles, I decided to scale back on writing books for the meantime. I don’t currently have enough money or time to invest the time in that area. However, I can build up my writing again through publishing articles regularly, as well as improve my editing skills. Eventually, I want to compile these articles into a book about language learning. I don’t have a specific angle yet.

At the moment, I am keeping myself accountable through writing daily (though this does not always happen). This has wavered, as my mood and mental health took dramatic turns, but I have written over 235 000 words since September 2020. I have a lot of unedited material in Dropbox that was intended for a full-length book, but might better serve readers as an article in the meantime.

While I don’t have the capital to make a business of this, I can at least build up a portfolio. The idea about going into flash fiction is great, as I have a serious problem with wordiness and misplacement of adverbs.

As usual, first rate article! Looking forward to more!

I had a seemingly non-productive 2020–at least in terms of turning out books. For the first time in my full-time author career, I didn’t put out a single new book last year. Part of it was I needed to do things that made me a consistent income–which writing never has. So I went on a search to return to old haunts of a regular paycheck. Lots of interviews but then the pandemic hit and everything fell apart. I had turned all my energy to reigniting that flame and, for the first time in my life, felt like a complete failure for not landing a job.

So, I started a couple of businesses, thinking they would grow slowly and take at most 50% of my time. Good news is they grew quickly. Bad news is they take 150% of my time (sounds like your ghostwriting did the same). At the same time, I had several “emergencies” with family situations–each one taking days or weeks out of my working schedule. The pandemic has made it more difficult for so many people to function. In short, I always felt that I was struggling to make 36 hour days and 10 day weeks in order to stay on top of things. As you can imagine, not possible no matter how much I tried to build a world that could operate that way.

Now, a year later, things have settled down–as much as they can given our crazy world. The past couple months I’ve been taking stock of what brings me joy in my author career and what is simply joyless work. I don’t have a complete answer for that, but I know changes are in store. I’ve also decided the new businesses are interesting and I want to keep doing them but not so much that I can’t write at all. So I’m developing a schedule that allows me to work my usual 100% of the time (maybe 120% on occasion) with half of it around writing and being an author, and the other half around my businesses. This means cutting back on clients and the amount of work I take in for others, and actually putting on the calendar the days and hours I am facing my computer and writing a novel or nonfiction book. Equally important is have time for interacting with husband, extended family, and friends on a regular basis instead of simply trying to fit them in at the last moment.

A year ago, I would have never imagined I would be in this place of change and having to make these decisions. I was doing the “author thing” pretty consistently for eight years–three books a year, networking, writing in series (couldn’t stay to one genre though) and had it all down. It was working…until it wasn’t.

Everyone has their own path and a life to navigate for their career. I don’t think there is a difference between a full-time writer and a part-time writer except that the full-time writer counts on that production for their income (unless he/she has a partner who pays all the bills and what the writer makes is gravy). Someone who counts on that income must treat it like a job–and for many creatives once it is a job it takes the joy out of the writing. For me it’s the opposite. Having a job where I can be creative is joy. But that doesn’t mean I just write. There is a lot of over things to do to make that job pay.

When I was a professor, I didn’t just teach or just do research, or just help graduate students with their dissertations (all of which I loved). I also had to do the other things that did not bring me joy: go to meetings, engage in faculty politics, compete for grant money. Long before that, when I was a waitress I loved interacting with people, but hated all the cleanup and some of the mean people. When I was a secretary, I loved meeting my bosses needs for organization and reports and planning–often anticipating those needs. I hated being an office with a chain smoker (yes, it was that long ago when smoking in offices was still a thing). I hated the way some people treated me, as if being a woman meant I only had half a brain.

Every career has its joys and challenges. The key is to find as much joy as you can and when you work for yourself, you are the one in charge of that–finding that balance of joy and work. May you find that again, Kristin. I’m counting on finding it this year again myself.

I’ve found it is shocking what you’ll use from those unplanned paths. Without my experience as a tech writer, I never could have written three books and a gazillion blogs about how to use social media…and written it in a way that was fun and regular people could understand. I remember when I wrote software instructions, I’d read the copy to my then 55 year-old mom who believed she’d break the internet if she touched anything. If she understood what I wrote, it was good to go. Did the same thing with all my social media books. And frankly, being one of the first, if not THE first social media/branding expert for authors helped my career do a bit of a warp speed that never would have happened had I remained trying to be a novelist. We writers are like crows, picking up all the interesting shiny bits others toss away 🙂 .

That and a “murder of writers” sounds apropos.