The storm had taken out a power substation and Max and more than 1,500 others were without electricity. The summer afternoon darkened quickly and the storm was upon Max’s home.
Having nothing else to do, Max sat and watched the storm through the bay window. He saw the lightning briefly illuminate the cloud-dimmed windows in long and short bursts.
“It looks like an old signal lamp,” he said to his old dog, Freda. “Just like I used back in the Navy. I wonder what this storm is trying to tell me.”
If your love is writing books, that’s a passion that’s way outside of the umbrella of income.
– Walter Mosely
midnight storm —
cat uses shoe
as a pillow
The readily available evidence indicates that writing fiction for a living is becoming less of an option for those of us with expensive tastes such as food and shelter. The raw numbers can be seen here: Book Advances, Royalty Checks, and Making a Living as a Writer, by Adriann Ranta. It looks easier to win a lottery jackpot with an expired ticket. Some few will always be able to make it happen, of course, but they will increasingly be the exceptions to the rule.
Where does this lead us? Directly to Working the Double Shift, by Emily St. John Mandel. She writes about treating writing as a second job, which makes sense to me. It’s not as glamorous, but it’s practical in terms of money and perhaps in terms of finding things and people to write about, or in letting our subconscious work on a story while we earn the house payment.
Finally, Lapham’s Quarterly assures us that even great writers have held day jobs, so we need not feel badly about the necessity ourselves. (From the world of science, a reminder that Albert Einstein was working in a Swiss patent office when he wrote his groundbreaking papers on light quanta, Brownian motion, and special relativity. Perhaps a mind-numbing job for part of the day can lead to a burst of creativity at other times.)
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
– Samuel Johnson
Dr. Johnson might scoff at this blog and the innumerable other blogs where writers write for the sheer joy of doing so. Not getting paid for writing is one reason people have told me not to do this blog. “Send those stories to magazines and make money off of them.” Reasonable advice, of course, but harkening back to Monday’s Pen to Paper, the traditional publishing options are fading away in the face of the digital revolution.
Continue reading “Pen to Paper: The Advantages of Posting Your Work Online”
With a respectful nod to the late, great Jim Croce for the title
The door to the bar opened, spilling a little fresh air and a gringo inside.
A few of the locals looked up from their beers and their cards to study the gringo. He was young but not a boy. He was nicely dressed but not expensively. He was clean but he had been sweating in the southwestern heat. He was not one of them, but the pain in his eyes made him an honorary citizen of their little bar so they left him alone.
The gringo took a stool at the bar, leaving a few polite open spaces between himself and the other man sitting there.
“Una cerveza, por favor,” the gringo said. The bartender nodded his graying head and produced a lightly chilled bottle of beer. The gringo stared at it for a long time. At last he spoke quietly: “All the time I have left is in this bottle.” He picked up the beer and downed half of it.
He has the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he can’t understand.
– Olivia “Susy” Clemens, of her father
fireflies signal —
one inside
one outside
In South Pacific, Nellie says to Emile of World War II, “I don’t think it’s the end of the world. Do you?” He replies, “The end of some worlds, perhaps.”
Technology always ends some worlds for some people. One of my brothers-in-law is a farrier — a specialist in the care and shoeing of horses’ hooves. Such people were once ubiquitous. In the early 21st century, he’s the closest thing to an anachronism I personally know. The automobile nearly did away with his profession years before he was born.
Garrison Keillor laments the dismissing of the guard in the world of publishing. The technology that lets me post my haiku and fiction here and that lets me run my own little publishing company is slowly gaining ground over the model of publishing that was the norm during the 19th and 20th centuries.
His points about authors not making a living from writing anymore and how difficult it may become to find the best writing without its having been anointed by a gatekeeper are well taken.
But I like the democracy inherent in our digital publishing forums. The times, they are a-changing, and with all due respect and then some to Mr. Keillor, I can’t get nostalgic about carbon copies and the whims of dyspeptic editors (having been one myself over the years). The more people we have practicing literacy, the better.
The week began appropriately somber for Memorial Day. Now, let’s start the weekend with something light.
Chuck Lorre is a sitcom writer and creator. His credits include Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, and my favorite, The Big Bang Theory.
But even someone with those impressive writing chops occasionally looks upward and makes requests of a higher power.