Will Write for Food

Well, as many of you know, last Friday the economy finally reared its ugly head in my direction, and frankly, I ain’t all that upset about it.

Yet.

The company that I worked for– a nifty production house called Technisonic Studios that had been in business for 70 odd years (no kidding!  Tina Turner and Chuck Berry recorded some of their first albums there back when the joint was mostly a high-end recording studio!) — completely shut its doors.  Nobody here but us chickens.

There were people in tears, moving through the halls as if a bomb had gone off.  In a sense, of course, it had.

I am far better off than many of them.  I really wasn’t even particularly upset.  I like spontaneity and adventure, and it’s pretty easy for me from a career perspective because I can just fall back on doing freelance work, which I sort of prefer anyway.  But I felt really bad for everyone else.  A lot of you know exactly how this feels right about now, I am sure.

But the bottom line is– who’d a thunk it!?– I am one step closer to writing for a living.  Right?  For better or worse, I now have the time to write a lot more, and to promote what I finish.  Woo!  It’s likely, I suppose, that in the coming weeks I will begin James Potter 4.  I look forward to that.  I will also be pouring some serious time into the promotion for “Ruins of Camelot” in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it’ll make me enough coin to support me and mine for a short time.

Is that too much to hope for?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  A guy in my position can’t afford to give up hoping.  And that, really, is the hardest struggle of all.  Again, many of you probably know exactly what I am talking about.  The writing isn’t the hard part.  The self promotion and the constant barrage of professional rejection isn’t even the hard part.  It’s carrying around the hope that someday this will all be proved worthwhile, that someday our expectations will be met, we’ll break through, and the hopes will magically transform into reality.  In the face of everything that says “give up!”, it’s the carrying on of that hope– that heavy, stubborn, exhausting hope– that is the real work of becoming a writer (or anything else worthwhile, I suppose).

Le sigh and le moan.  Onward.  And upward.