driving home –
new paint job
hides friend’s house
Tag: job
Quotable 380
One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontation.
– Richard Wilbur
Quotable 294
Think in terms of what audiences think. They go to the theatre, and they either notice that their butts are numb, or they don’t. If you’re doing your job right, they don’t.
– Joss Whedon
Quotable 276
Every time I hear writers talk about “the muse,” I just want to bitch-slap them. It’s a job. Do your job.
– Nora Roberts
Quotable 247
Your job as a writer is to systematically deny the goal to your main character.
– Mary Robinette Kowal
#quikfic 45
He dumped the roach out of his mug and poured in fresh coffee. “Fifteen years in this damned job, it’s way too late to get picky.”
Pen to Paper: Writing vs. Paying the Bills
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.)
Fiction: Living on the Air
Lorraine didn’t believe in astrology. Nor did she, as so many people do, open a book, point to a sentence and use that as a guide for the day. Further, she had no truck with runes or tarot or any other fortune-telling schemes.
She had something much better than all those petty and discredited oracles.
On Monday morning, Lorraine bopped the alarm clock and sat up in bed. As always, she felt the sense of the day’s mystery both surrounding and permeating her. She got out of bed, made it carefully, and went in to shower.
After drying her hair, she poured her usual bowl of bran flakes and made two pieces of toast with elderberry jam, which reminded her of her father. Just before eating, she reached into a drawer. Inside were a little transistor radio, a pair of scissors, and fifty-four unopened packages of AA batteries, two to a package. She drew out the radio, the scissors, and a package of batteries. She cut open the package of batteries and opened the radio’s battery compartment. After placing the scissors back in the drawer Lorraine put the batteries in the radio.