I've been wondering whether or not I should try and go back to fulltime work sometime in the New Year. Professionally I do pretty bog-standard typesetting and design for a local printing company, but I miss the independence and control I had until relatively recently as a self-employed editor. And if you think that sounds cool, well, my experiences deserved an entire and very lengthy blog all to itself. It's a real shame I didn't know about blogging at the time, or I would have recorded it all - and prayed none of the people I was writing about ever saw it. Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy people. The only good thing about editing a disability magazine (Special Needs) and designing a music magazine (no, seriously, it was mental, but not in a good way) was I'm still going out with Mandy, one of the writers.
I have a couple grand in the bank to top up the minimal (500 or so) quid I make a month at the printers, but it's not really that much, and I do have a dream of finally getting a mortgage. I used to think selling a book would help that until I found out just how little first-time novelists really get. And since I've been on holiday (ie the printers has been closed for a couple of weeks so there's no work to go to until Monday), it means I'm even poorer than usual. But this is, to a certain extent, out of choice; I wouldn't have written Angel Stations in the time I did otherwise. 140,000 words in seven or eight months.
My plan was to keep going like this until I got another one written or to see if Angel Stations sold, but I've read interviews with writers who managed to write books while working full time. But I don't know ... I'd rather not take three years to write just the one book ...
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