On Being A Full-Time Writer...

 The subject of the week is Being a Full-Time writer: is it your dream? How do you pay for it?

I AM a full-time writer. I also work a full-time job and have since I started writing. In the very beginning, I worked at a restaurant five to six nights a  week, took a bus from the place were y wife worked in the daytime and she would pick me up around 11 PM every night that I worked. It wasn't exactly fun, but it mostly paid the bills.

That's the catch, you see, paying the bills. When I started as a writer I did a lot of work for hire. Just in case you don't understand that concept yet (I most certainly didn't when I started out) that's when you write for somebody else's intellectual property. The first thing I ever wrote that got published was an eight-page story for Clive Barker's Hellraiser comic. The second thing I got paid for was an Iron Man story that never did see print. Number three was a comic book based on a video game. The fourth was Clive barker's Nightbreed comic, and then I started doing work for roleplaying game companies. All of that was work where they paid me but got to keep the copyright for what I wrote. 

for the record, I'm okay with that. It took me about seven seconds to understand the concept. My work. Their money. They keep my work. How much is it worth to me? That varied a lot. Let's leave it at this: I was making damned decent scratch and some of those works allowed me to pay y bills when the actual day job didn't. Why was that? Because my wife had health issues and paying for insurance took as much money as paying the monthly rent. 

We always make choices Thanks to the preposterously stupid health costs in this country, I required two jobs (along with my wife's employment) to cover the rising costs of health insurance and medications. for the record, I still wound up declaring bankruptcy because of medical bilks at one point. Do I sound bitter? It's only because I am.

My point is, that I have always been a fulltime writer. From day one. Long before I sold anything, I wrote from four to six hours a day. Once I started selling it became longer hours, and coffee became my best friend for YEARS. I also used to put out roughly 5,000 words on an average day, with my best day ever being 11,700 words in one eight-hour stint. If I got the novel finished by the end of that particular month there was a one thousand dollar bonus. Dance monkey, dance!

I have also, with very rare exceptions, worked at least a part-time job ever since The exceptions were all medically related, by the way. Three months off for knee surgery and recovery, and then a little over a year off for cancer and the chemotherapy and radiation treatments, plus recovery time. 

I still write every day. I still work at least four days a week. I still like having medical insurance and sometimes that's damned hard to afford.

You want to be a writer? You write. You want to pay the bills? Well, I didn't marry rich, so I work. This isn't something that bothers me at all I knew the price of admission when I started on this ride, and I've never had a problem with it.  Writing is my passion, and writing never seems like work to me.

My point is simple: We do what we must. I'm hardly the only one, believe me. 

I have over 40 novel-length works to y name. I'm working on three more novels right now, as well as several short stories, collaborative efforts, and two novellas. I have referred to myself as the modern equivalent of a pulp writer more than once because compared to a lot of writers, I have a rather epic word count, 

If you're curious you can see most of my publications listed right here.  

A full BIBLIOGRAPHY is available too.