As I focus on making a living at this writing thing, with a side-gig of art, I’ve realized that there will never be a perfect week. For one thing, this is a terrible way to make a living. Yes, I’m serious. Sure, it’s a dream come true and all that, but I wouldn’t be doing it if I could have a day job. Day job, writing around that, making art just to relax… that’s the much, much easier route to take. Trying to do this without a safety net? Do not recommend.

Fortunately, because the alternative doesn’t bear considering, my life is shaped around being with my husband and making sure his medical appointments are attended, and that would make a job with a commute nigh impossible. Add to that my inability to find another remote job using the skills I spent close to a decade developing, because remote work was briefly ascendant and then a nation of middle managers realized what was happening to their jobs and yanked everyone back into the cube farms again. Also, I’ll be fifty in two months. Age discrimination is very real. All of which, looked at with the cold eye of reality after sending out a couple hundred applications and not getting even a call back, made me realize that I’m not a marketable commodity. Hence, the dive into the deep end of ‘doing this for a living.’ So. Don’t do it. Unless of course you simply have no other option. Don’t do it for money, though, if you need money do something else.

My current schedule is to write for the bulk of my mornings. Unless, of course, there is an appointment which takes us out of the house. I’m trying not to write on weekends, but I do my art on weekends and also client commission work if I’ve got a deadline. So mostly I’m not working seven days a week. This last week I was able to be home, and writing, and still had a difficult day Thursday getting words down. On the other hand, the days I did write the story came fast, and I got about 15K words in five days of work. It’s a good start.

The trouble is, I’m looking at velocity and wondering if, even if I could write a novel a month, if that would budge the income needle. Or, and I’m afraid this would be the case, I simply would overwhelm my limited audience base. What I need to do is broaden the audience. I have ideas on this, and I’ve been working for the last year on doing the marketing work necessary. I’m slowly seeing that pay off, but it’s time to scale that up further. Only… I want to write, not market. Well, enough of the whining. I get it done, or I try to get a day job of some kind. Which, for the reasons I touched on above, may not even be possible.

This morning I’m scheduled to go on a date with my husband (yay!) then come home, do a video recording for my Youtube channel, supper with friends, and somewhere in there I need to mop the kitchen floor. One of those elements isn’t marketing, but marketing adjacent. Tomorrow? Well, I have the house clean, but I have a project I need to wrap up. I need to invoice a client. I need to talk to my editor for a progress report on a book she’s working on. I have to plot out the week following. Because that needs to be an ideal writing week. And what is the ideal? One in which I have written, and we make it to the other end of the week together. I’ll add in one more spinning plate next week, and sit down to plan out a marketing schema for the coming months. I finally got a royalty check, so I can afford to invest in some marketing and see if I can make that pay off. One step at a time, I’m working on making this really work. I’m not going to blow smoke up your skirt, this is hard. On the other hand, I don’t regret what I’ve decided to do. Time with my husband is precious. The books I’m writing are exciting and I love seeing the reviews come in. Just don’t confuse the ideal for the real.