From The Literary Hub:
I did not lose 15 pounds after writing a book. I still go to bed mentally cursing the pouch of fat that has taken up residence beneath my bellybutton that ends up laced with the red marks of too-tight jeans.
My bedroom did not magically become cleaner, or receive more natural light. I wrote a book, but I am still not the type of person who wakes up early Sunday mornings, tucks her hair behind a bandana and scrubs the bathroom like a cheerful, Pinterest-y Cinderella. Post-book Dana still has take-out rotting in her fridge that she couldn’t afford to pay the $3.99 delivery fee on, but did anyway. A curdled skin of soy sauce still dots my kitchen table.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
When I was a Published Author, I would wake up in a bed with clean sheets and a 1,000 thread-count, and, after a breakfast of homemade bread and tea, would make my way over to a solid walnut desk, a fountain pen on hand ready to be lifted and help reveal my genius to reveal itself. The jam on my bread would come from berries in my garden (I can keep a garden not just alive, but thriving)and I end the day with a long jog at twilight that I go on because now I’m the type of person who just loves the way jogging clears my head and not the type of person who feels like throwing up a lung approximately four minutes after she convinces herself that going for a run was a good idea. The evening ends with a literary salon where Donna Tartt and Chimamanda Adichie and Michael Chabon and Lauren Groff and I listen to classical music and drink wine and laugh in my well-upholstered sitting room. None of us spill.
The miserable truth is, writing a book did not change my life. It made me proud, yes, and it made me a little bit of money (less, trust me, always less than people imagine, especially when tax season comes around), but I am still the same messy, procrastinating, nervous, usually sad person I was before I completed what had, up until that point, been my lifelong dream.
. . . .
There are a lot of things you should do because you always enjoy doing it: watching Netflix. Going on roller coasters. Writing is not always enjoyable, and truth be told, I do not always write because I’m an artist who simply cannot but help to express herself creatively and who by putting pen to paper achieves the closest we mortals can to experiencing the bliss of Nirvana. We don’t become writers to burn our manuscripts when we complete them like paper-and-ink mandalas: we write for other people to read our work, to communicate something to the outside world. Sometimes writing is joyful and fun. A lot of times it is a chore.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
Some people dream of being writers, they don’t necessarily dream of writing.
As the kids say, this. So much this.
Alas, “Castle” is not a documentary about life as an author. Or at least not about the average life and income of the average author of my ken.
Darn it, I got into this racket for those 1,000 thread sheets. Now this person comes along and tells me it’s all a lie!
Oh, wait – I’m an indie, not being published and underpaid by the likes of Randy Penguin, and I don’t have an agent to embezzle what little I am underpaid. I can still dream the good dream…
I posted her article on Facebook and added the following comment:
When I was a kid, I wrote all the time. I filled notebooks with stories and I horrified my teachers with gruesome narratives of gunfire and blood. When I got a computer my sophomore year of high school, I began to fill disks with all sorts of stories. Getting into D&D only caused my productivity to grow, because now I was writing fiction *and* engaging in RPG world building and story-creating.
Once I hit college, I kept gaming, but fiction writing petered out. I never had *any* actual belief that I’d be writing a novel (or novels), and the time just wasn’t there. I did write a novella in my early 20s, but by and large, my creative writing went into gaming, because I did not see a scenario where I spent years looking for an agent, then more years shopping a book around to a publisher, and honestly, I didn’t want that “desk drawer novel” mocking me from its tomb.
But once I began to hear about Kindle Direct Publishing, that’s when the light appeared, and I began forming the notion that I could, in fact, take an idea from fancy to fruition. I absolutely credit a friend of mine for telling me, flat out, “Just write it, what do you have to lose?” or something to that effect, and he was right.
And writing/publishing has absolutely changed my life in a number of ways. I have a whole branch of my social tree, mostly people I have never met face-to-face, that I communicate with regularly about writing and publishing. I have gotten to a place of modest veterancy where I have provided advice to people (and taught classes about the process). I’ve become more confident in my creative abilities, modest though they are, and while my day job pays the bills, I don’t worry so much about it being “exciting” or spiritually fulfilling, because, that’s why I write.
And, of course, there’s the money. My wife asked me in the beginning what my financial benchmark for success was, and I said it was a hundred dollars a month. I hit that within a couple of months after the first Commando novel went live, and have done far better than that every single month, for the last six years. My royalties have been a very much appreciated financial cushion I could fall back on over the years, especially when large, unexpected expenses hit us.
So while I’m not living a life where I am constantly surrounded by a diffuse, glowing aura of golden light, perhaps as if I am eclipsing a sunset while standing on the balcony of my Tuscan villa with a glass of wine in my hand, I know that I am definitely *not* the same person I would be at this point in time if I hadn’t gone down this road.
Writing a book isn’t to change ‘your’ life – unless it’s to get it to stop driving you crazy. If you’re very lucky though, your book might change someone else’s life, or give them a different point of view, or at the very least occupy their mind/thoughts for a time.