I’m baaaack!
And I want to start by saying thank you to everyone for your condolences and sympathy, and for your understanding about the hiatus. I hadn’t expected it to go on so long, frankly, but I am my father’s executor and it is taking much longer than I expected to get that squared away so that I can actually execute things. (We will not talk, at the moment, about who and what I would like to execute; let’s just say that bureaucracy and non-standardization are pretty high up the list. I get that they all want eighteen forms to prove that I am who I say and I have the right to do what I’m supposed to do, but couldn’t the insurance agency and the stock broker and the bank and the credit card companies get together so they need the same eighteen forms?)
Ahem.
Let’s talk about writing, shall we?
Fiction writers are lucky in a lot of ways – we control our own schedules, we mostly write what we want and not what somebody else tells us to, we can sleep until four p.m. every day and work in our jammies if we want. Beyond all that, though, is the fact that the Internet has given all of us the opportunity not to jump on the publishing treadmill, which is not something that’s available in very many other professions.
We have a lot of options. Writing is amazingly portable – it’s something one can do almost anywhere, anytime. (It’d be kind of hard to write while scuba diving, but they have pens now that work underwater…) There’s a tremendous variety to what one can produce – every genre is different in the sorts of stories and writing it emphasizes, in addition to the obvious differences in topics.
But there’s another thing that I think is important, and to explain, I’m going to have to go off-topic for a few minutes.
One of the things I’ve noticed lately (like, the last few years) on the Interwebs is a growing emphasis on developing a side hustle – turning that thing you do for love as a hobby into a money-generating business. I think it started with the crash in 2008, and it’s not like it’s a completely terrible idea (especially if one has just lost one’s day job and is desperate for a way to pay the utility bills). The highest complement to someone’s hobby work has become, “You’re really good! Have you thought about selling those paintings/toys/shawls/woodcarvings/donuts?”
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the whole “make it a side hustle” thing has very nearly gotten to the point where you’re not expected to do anything for love and fun. The attitude seems to be that if you aren’t making money at it, you shouldn’t be doing it … or at least, you should be doing something else that will make you money.
My father started doing marquetry – wood inlay – when he was twelve. When he died, he was working on a writing box for me. (Quite literally; he was sitting at the table piecing together bits of wood when his heart stopped.) This is one of the pieces he did in the last couple of years, a small box he made for my mother to keep sewing notions in:
Dad told me once that he realized in his twenties that he could either turn his woodworking into a business, or keep it as a hobby. He chose the latter, because he loved it too much to make it a profession that he had to do.
But Dad wasn’t enormously prolific when it came to turning out marquetry. Anyone who knits or crochets regularly has run into the problem of what to do with all those sweaters/shawls/afghans. That’s when the side hustle becomes really tempting.
Thanks to the Internet, though, writers have other options between “stick it in the bottom drawer like Emily Dickenson,” “spend a ton of time and energy self-publishing and selling it (Amazon still counts for this one),” and “get an agent and license the work to a professional/traditional publishing house.”
Fanfiction, in particular, lets the writer who does it for love off the “you should sell that” hook, at least to some extent. Good fanfic writers do get the occasional question about why they haven’t gone professional, but “I don’t have ideas about anyone but these characters” and/or “there isn’t really much of a market for short fiction” usually cover it. And there are even websites those who want to make their original fiction available without going through the extra hassle of formal publication and tracking all the business and tax details.
I talk a fair amount in this blog about the business aspects of writing. I also try to emphasize that what works for one writer won’t necessarily work for another one. (Except when it comes to the IRS.) So today I wanted to say that you aren’t actually required to sell your stuff professionally, or self-publish, or make money at it. Writing for the love of it, in order to get better at it, in order to create stories that you had fun writing – that can be enough. (And should you be “lucky” enough for an editor to offer you a contract for one of these pieces, you are allowed to say “no” for whatever reasons you want. And you don’t have to explain.) For those who do want to get into the world of professional writing … I’ll talk more about that next week.
P.S. – While I was away, my host switched to a new system for handling WordPress pages. Everything seems to have gone smoothly, but if something seems odd or isn’t quite working the way it used to, please let us know.
Welcome back, and I hope the procedural hassles both go away quickly and prove useful inspiration.
I know a few old-school writers who feel strongly that you should never give anything away: either you’re writing something you can sell, or you shouldn’t be writing it. I’m happy to give away the stuff I can’t sell if it’s of use/interest to someone, but I make sure it’s going out via a free channel so that nobody else is making money off it either.
There are very few jobs in which you can do the thing for money all day, and then do the same thing for fun in the evening, without getting bored. Playing with computers can be one. Writing, I think, can be another.
Old-school writers are accustomed to writing being a zero-sum game for a relatively small audience, broken up by language and country and constrained by the physical limits of distribution networks. Giving stuff away free was diluting your market. The Internet makes things much less of a zero-sum: the market for English-language e-books is “anyone in the entire world who can read English,” which is such a gigantic number that *reaching* all those people becomes the hard part. Hence the value, for professional writers, of “giving stuff away” as publicity/outreach is much bigger.
Welcome back!
And yeah, things take longer than expected. When you wrote “some time in January” I mentally doubled the time to “some time in February,” and I should have tripled it to “some time in March.” :/
But to talk about writing, I don’t care to write fan-fiction, so I can’t use that excuse. Instead I’ve been posting my short stories as freebies and telling my Internal Accountant that it’s advertising. My novels and my one novella (of just under 19k words) I’ve publish for low-rent values of publishing, and have so far gotten back payments in the two-digit range each year.
The sewing notions box is beautiful! Thanks for showing us the photo.
And welcome back! You have been missed.
Welcome back, Patricia. You have been missed. Being an executor does take time and the number of required documents can be a mental hurricane. Been there, saw that, and purchased a number of oddly crafted tee shirts.
I don’t write for ‘fun’ or simply for myself, though it seems at this point in my writing I am writing for free. I’m a storyteller. I enjoy telling stories so my friends, a carefully chosen and limited lot, are my audience. Free for now, but when the current WIP is done they will have to pony up for it. Fortunately they understand and support that.
Welcome back!
*Happy Dance* –> breaks out the chocolate stash, everyone have (a virtual) one on me 🙂
Carol’s mother died early September, and even though she isn’t the prime executor (Thankfully, her older sister took on that onus), she is still dealing with the detritus and fallout entailed. Reducing a life to a series of legal procedures and protocols is such a weird undertaking.
“Weird” isn’t the word I’d use, though it is certainly how some of it feels. It’s more like trying to go through a labyrinth walking backwards with a bunch of people shouting contradictory directions at you, while you have the feeling that a thunderstorm is going to start any minute and halt all forward progress for some indefinite period.
I have had fun, and this is not it. I am SO looking forward to getting back to something normal like writing…
As long as the walls of the labyrinth don’t start moving on you. . . .
Wow, your dad did beautiful work!
I’m glad you’re back. 🙂
Welcome back!
If one must go, I can’t think of a better way to go than literally whilst doing something you love for someone you love.
And that box is absolutely gorgeous.
On topic: There are many things I do for the love or the fun of it: painting, juggling, a dabbling of 3-D stuff, etc. None of these are things known for the money to be made at them, even if I did want to put in the effort to be that good at them. Back when I was doing martial-arts swordfighting, a number of people told me I should make practice swords to sell, but that brings an ugly calculation into the mix: No one would pay the amount I’d have to charge to make a decent hourly wage for the time it took. And if one is making less than burger-flipping money at something, it fast becomes work, not fun, and a particularly exploitative-feeling kind of work at that. Far better to keep it as a thing one does for the joy of making it and the satisfaction of the end result, not the dangling bait of a paycheck.
Writing, meanwhile, is more of a compulsion, since it’s also not known for raking in the coin and I have to look quizzically at the idea of calling much of the process “fun”. And yet, I keep doing it….
Hi, as a kid I adored the dealing with dragons series, I never got around to finishing them, but as a (at the time) little boy (I’m a trans woman) I adored the protagonist, and I looked up to her rebelliousness, and essentially demanding to be treated with respect while enjoying things that she chooses to enjoy, and I have always looked up to that. I would love to get around to reading or audiobook-listening to the rest of them at some point, and I plan to look into your other books as well. (I know this hasn’t much to do with the main post, but I wanted to contact you to tell you this, as a fan of Dealing With Dragons who from 8 to 27 hasn’t forgotten about it)
Welcome back! Sorry to hear about the bureaucracy you are dealing with (as a professional bureaucrat I sympathize) and I hope it will finish soon.
I appreciated your comments about doing things for fun. I enjoy writing and want to do it better. I also love my day job and don’t want to leave it; if I ever sell a piece of writing then I will be shocked and astonished. I’m happy to have it remain a happy hobby.
It’s so good to see your blog again! I have missed your words, but I certainly understand the burdens of wrapping up the business part of someone’s life. Just glad to know that you are well, though perhaps somewhat frazzled.
Thank you for taking on the issue of doing things just for the love. I’ve only come close to making a living writing a couple of times: There was the newspaper job that might have paid a living wage if my paycheck hadn’t bounced, and the ghostwriting project that I came to loathe. I continue to love writing, though, and try to be professional about standards and deadlines.
Then there’s my husband, who designs and has 3D printed sets of exquisite narrow-gauge model railroad parts. He’s been asked why he doesn’t make it a business, but he simply doesn’t want all the business bother. So he does it for himself and a few friends, and for the fun of it.
Your father did beautiful work!
In order:
I am so sorry about your father; my condolences.
Ugh, I’m sorry about the documents, and, yes, being an executor is miserable and difficult (in my experience of watching my mother handle my grammy’s well-documented-and-organized-and-still-time-consuming-to-wade-through affairs…).
The box is absolutely gorgeous.
And, thank you for posting this!* I’m looking forward to the next post on behalf of my fiction (which wants an audience! …okay, maybe its author just wants it to have a paying audience); in the meantime, I’m gleefully applying this post’s advice to my doctoral research (ha! Not every class I take and not every technique I learn will directly feed into my future job! Take that, committee!).
*(What I meant to add to the end of my earlier comment, and didn’t remember until I’d hit “Submit Comment” – and thank you so much for all of these posts, and every book of yours that I’ve managed to find! The Enchanted Forest books are the first I remember reading, and probably shaped much more of my attitude towards the world than I realized at the time.)
Patricia –
I’m glad you took some time for important personal reasons — but so glad your back. Your blog was recommended to me during the interim and when I came to visit I saw the “going on hiatus” update and thought that I had missed the opportunity to follow such an interesting blog in “real time.”
Thank you for the picture of your fathers work. Really beautiful. This looks like a work of real love as well as artistry.