Given a choice between being a poor artist and a wealthy whore I’d pick the letter every time. Sorry, but there it is. I like nice stuff, eating well and not worrying about the bills. Unfortunately this is not a choice I get to make. Like it or not I am stuck with the artist thing. Dammit.
A few years back a service-related disability reared its ugly head and since then it has been very difficult for me to practice my profession of over twenty years. The government sends me a little money every month, God bless ’em, but I still need to make more. About the same time my wife and I stumbled into a chance to write for hire, and that paid a noticeable amount of money. More importantly we discovered that we love writing together. Hmmm… doing something we love, together, and making money at it? Heaven!
The good news is that we have ideas. Scads of them. We could open a discount idea warehouse store. Plenty of things to write about. Even better, we love to write in a popular genre. We are passionate about our stories; hell, we can’t write them otherwise. That’s that whole ‘artist’ thing. It’s what drives the whole process and makes it happen.
The bad news is that it takes time and a major investment in work. Sure, once in a long while lightning strikes and a first-time author writes a break-away best-seller. Like the lottery it seems as if this can happen to anyone… but it very, very rarely does. Better just to plug away, pay your dues and don’t count on the lightning. Build your readership. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s a marathon, not a sprint etc. All true and sound advice.
We’re adults. We get all that. We know from long experience that the road to success is long and paved with hard work. So we keep plugging away, getting the stories out there and pimping them to the best of our ability. We’re pleased with the results so far; we get good reviews for our work and we’re slowly building readership. But every once in a while- particularly while paying bills- we wish that we could just skip straight to the success part.
OK, time to stop whining and get back to work! Have a great week, everyone!