The ever pinch of economic instability is a bass line in most writers’ lives, but there are clearly reasons for continuing to do this thing!

1) It’s 9:54 am and I’m in my red checked pyjamas, drinking lai cha at the kitchen table, whilst keeping an eye out for my nemesis, Beet-stealing-hammock-gnawing-watashi-wo-bakanishiteiru-Black-Squirrel, as I ponder how to structure the climax scene of Darkness.

2) I don’t have to commute through rush hour traffic to sit at a disk in an office at a job that brings me no joy.

3) I am working on projects that I love and believe in. And my family and friends and community believe in me.

4) I can read all the books I want and it falls under professional development!!! The same can be said for watching films, plays, performances. Travel falls under research.

5) I meet a lot of interesting people.

6) No one tells me what to do. (Mmmmm. Well– editors make suggestions/recommendations, and a writer would be a fool to not to take them seriously. If books are mushrooms, then editors are part of the mycelium…. ^__^)

7) Groovy travel!

8) The simple/profound joy and pleasure of ‘making’….

I have many writer friends who have taken the teaching fork of the road, because it means economic stability. But they have very little time to write. I think it’s particularly difficult for writer/teachers who are novelists, because there’s a immersive quality to creating the world of a book, and to make it breathe. If you don’t have enough time to live in it yourself, it’s challenging to make it real on the page. It takes time. I envy these friends their economic stability, and they envy the amount of time I have to write. 

I love what I do. ~__~. It’s not ‘easy’, but is anything ever?

Endnote: I didn’t make doughnuts after all. But ate doughnut peaches!!!!