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Ha, this post is a little later than usual because I had one of those 14-hour days yesterday at the day job. And the long hours will probably continue until this problem is fixed.

So my writing took the back seat to what needed to be done.

One thing that I’ve been working on this year especially is being flexible and not becoming bitter when this happens. As I’ve said before on this blog, sometimes the day job must come first. It’s what allows me to live and pay my bills.

Writing is my passion, but unfortunately, it doesn’t pay anything at this time. And I have to remember during times like these that it’s not the reason I do it. I do it by my compulsion to tell a story. I do it to grow in my craft. And I do it because it is something that I love.

So when distractions take over in life as they sometimes do, I always try remember that it always calms down and I will be able to come back to my writing.

The writing will always be waiting for me.

So back to the drama that is my day job.

If any of you have any tips for dealing with distractions and stress, feel free to share. I need some tips on how to come back to my writing after having this major distraction.

I found a new blog this week. Yes, I know — like you need to know about another blog. Ha.

The Day Job: A Writer’s Inquiry is a blog where author Erin Moulton explores the day to day jobs of writers and authors.

I’ve always been fascinated of how other writers balance their time with work and writing. Here are snippets from some of the featured interviews so far:

“I worked in a bookstore. I worked as a waitress. I worked as a secretary. The worst job ever–I had a summer gig sewing sequins on costumes for the Ice Capades. I thought I’d die of boredom.” - Kathi Appelt

“Waitressing has been my most constant “wage earning job” while I have been writing. The flexible hours and lack of “take home” responsibilities suited my life style and my writing ambitions.” - Kelly Bennet

“I began writing on my lunch hour, after work, and after the Oklahoma City Bombing, decided to quit and write full-time. That tragedy was a wake-up call that life was precious, too often short, and that the time to make my dream come true was now.” - Cynthia Leitich Smith

So it got me thinking about my best and worst day jobs.

My best day job was when I worked a test proctor for software certifications. After getting the online test started, I could do whatever I wanted so I mostly wrote — those people could have been cheating on their test for all I knew.

My worst day job is when I was working in sales for a medical software company. We did a LOT of traveling, conferences, and it was very hard to focus on writing. I was too tired and mentally drained.

What about you? What days jobs have hurt or benefited your writing?

It’s been pretty crazy at the day job and I’m finding it challenge to fit my time in for writing. Times like these I muse about how my life would be if I could just dedicate all my time to writing.

But of course, I need to eat. And currently fiction doesn’t feed me.

I read this blog post Writing for a Living last week at The Kill Zone by guest blogger Mark Terry.

Through his experiences, he poses some sobering conclusions about making a living from writing:

“1. Just because a writer gets published doesn’t mean they make a living as a writer.

2. Many writers who write full-time as novelists have:

A well-paid, supportive spouse
Retired from a job and are on pensions and social security
Made a lot of money somewhere along the line and are now living on it
Write more than one novel a year
Supplement their novel-writing with other types of writing
Are lying
Are Top 10 bestselling authors

3. Just because their books says “bestselling author” does not mean they’re making tons of money.

4. There’s money to be made, but it’s not very reliable.”

I do know of some writers who make a living from their words but it’s very few.

The realistic point as a writer, you may never make your primary income from your words alone. But I think this is where you must write because you cannot write. You are doing it for more than just the money.

During these hectic times, I do wish there was more time to dedicate to my novel, but also during these times I feel blessed to have a job that sustains me financially.

What do you think? Is it naive to want to write for a living? Or should you think of writing as supplemental income?

While I was watching Chicago Tonight on Tuesday night, Phil Ponce interviewed a guy who took on 50 jobs in 50 states. He worked as a coal miner, a cook, lumberjack, among other occupations. That got me thinking about the tons of choices for jobs we can give our characters in manuscripts.

In Killer Career, the main character is a lawyer whose decision to change careers and become an author proves deadly. In Two Wrongs, the main character turns into a pro basketball player.

What about your characters? Tell us what they do for a living in your novel or manuscript.

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/

I just finished my time sheet for client payable hours at the day job.

Total hours worked this week: 70 hours.

How much time did I work on my novel revision?

Total hours worked this week: 2 hours.

And those two hours? That happened late last night when I had this epiphany about a major scene in Act 2 (even though I’m ONLY supposed to be revising Act 1) and I had to jump out of bed at 12:30 am and write it all down—I LOVE it when that happens!

Would it be nice to have 70 hours of writing instead of working at my day job?

Duh!

But oh well. Such is life. I’m working for a living.

But you know what? I should stop complaining. I am blessed to be working. I have friends who have been out of work most of this year—who are struggling to pay their bills and feed their families.

The fact that I’m too busy at work is a problem some people would love to have. I’m very grateful to have a job in this economy—a good paying job—which is an extra bonus.

I’m going to see if I can squeeze in some hours next week. My goal is 5 hours during the week for revision. That’s just an hour a day. And with my current schedule, maybe 11pm until midnight will work.

Worse case, I could resort to EARLY MORNING WRITING (that’s me the night owl screaming “Noooooooooooo!” in the background, LOL).

But seriously, this isn’t a sprint. The main goal is to just be involved with the novel revision daily—even if that just means I read and revise a paragraph. I will be happy. No need to beat myself up if I’m too tired from work to do a revision. Sleepy and cranky won’t produce the kind of result I’m looking for here.

Small steps equal progress.

I just got out of LONG early morning meeting and before I start on my journey of continuing to learn this new skill for my job, I read an interesting post, In Good Company by good writer friend Paula Chase.

She was talking about the reality of having a full time job and balancing it with writing. It’s a precarious balance indeed. She had a link to an essay, Working the Double Shift by Emily St. John Mandel.

Here’s an excerpt from a writer interviewed in the essay, Elise Blackwell, that spurned agreement with me:

“Yet office work and even professional writing/journalism can be deadly, using up a writer’s energy with similar but less creative tasks. It’s hard to stare at a computer screen for 8 or 9 hours and then go home and compose on computer (which is how I mostly write).”

This is true for me. In my day job, I’m a technical writer, a system analyst, and at sometimes even a software engineer. Although the nature of my job is very geeky and technical in nature, it does require a lot of face time with the computer screen. But in other ways, it has actually helped my writing—as far as being concise and keeping my grammatical skills on point. But it is an issue. Especially now since I’m working 12-14 hours a day.

Then, of course you can also use the day job as excuse for not writing.

“Awful to not have time to write because of your job. We’ve all been there. But how much worse would it be to have time to write, and yet not be able to? [...] I suspect that any number of writers depend on their day jobs in this manner, whether we’re conscious of it or not: it’s true that your job prevents you from writing, by virtue of the fact that it takes up your time, but it’s also something to hide behind when the writing isn’t going well.”

But most of all, quitting the day job and “writing full-time” would not be all roses and caviar as many writers who do this can testify. It’s still hard work. Sort of liking changing jobs rather than just quitting one.

You should definitely go and check out the full essay.

At lunch today, I was reading some links from Tayari Jones’s blog and she had a funny link to an article titled Managing Writers in the Workplace – A Guide for Employers.

The article even gives advices to managers by type of writer (poets, playwrights, non-fiction writers).

I found this part of the article funny (and true at times — not for me, of course. Just other writers I know, hee, hee):

“Due to the nature of her work, the fiction writer will sometimes suffer from lack of sleep or a hangover. This should be seen as positive: lack of sleep means she is getting some writing done; the hangover means she has been fantasizing about her future on the bestseller list, which will improve her spirits (once she recovers from the hangover).”

You should check it out if you need a laugh. Working a day job is necessary but sometimes it can be tough for a writer (and maybe managers too).

I just finished up my lunch here at work so I thought I would blog about walking the tight-rope between working a day job and writing a novel.

It’s not easy, let me tell you…

Right now at my day job, I’m going to have to learn a whole new skill. It’s sort of complicated and will probably take me a good month or so to really understand and master it. I love learning new things — especially technical geeky things — but I also realize what this will mean for the next month or so: limited writing.

I know some people can do a lot of things at once well — I’m not really one of those people — don’t get me wrong, I try to balance and have been doing so for awhile. This summer was a testament that I CAN write a 60K draft in a 3-month period, but unfortunately, a draft is all I have. It’s not something that I can show to anyone. It’s not submission-ready.

I was also lucky at the day job because my existing expertise was enough to get my tasks done. But now, that won’t be enough and I’m going to have to focus most of my attention on learning this new skill.

So times like these, I have to just cut myself some slack. The goals that I had for next month probably won’t be fully met, but it doesn’t mean that I stop writing and revising and give up. It just means that I have to compromise and find a way to do both. This means that I’ll probably have to focus on my writing on weekends and maybe a few nights a week when I’m not dog-tired from work.

It’s all about priorities. When you have an already full list of things that must be done, as a writer, you have to figure out where the novel fits on your to-do list. I’m trying my best to keep it at the top, but in doing so, it also means that something on my list gets pushed down to the bottom.

It would be nice to have more time to write but this is my reality and I’m going to have to deal with it.

It’s one of the hazards of working and writing.

Between watching the Michael Jackson memorial and hitting a major stumbling block (only 336 words for the Challenge), I’m really drained. But before shutting the laptop down, I found this link off a Tayari Jones blog post.

10 Questions Writers Must Ask Before Quitting Their Day Job on the Writer’s Digest website is an interesting read.

Not that I intend to quit my day job. Although it would be nice to not to go work tomorrow since it’s technically early morning and basically “tomorrow” already.

These questions in particular caught my interest:

Do I really need to write full time to be successful?

I don’t think that this is true. I know many writers with day jobs and writers that don’t have day jobs as well. The writers without day jobs still have other responsibilities though like taking care of children, etc. So the real issue here is time management. You can make it happen either way.

Can I find affordable health insurance?

When I was in graduate school a few years ago, I didn’t work and I remember my health insurance was VERY expensive and limited. I remember getting sick and not going to the doctor because I didn’t want to spend money on the visit. That’s a bad feeling. I can only imagine how much health insurance is now.

What’s my plan for human interaction?

One thing about going to work is that I get to mingle with my co-workers, who I actually like and share my love of all things tecky geek. And since my office is in a main business district of Atlanta, there are always interesting people to meet during the day.

I think I would miss that if I didn’t have a day job. But of course, if I were a full time Novelista, I’m sure I would get over it and write in a cafe or bookstore (which I do anyway). That would be a nice problem to have.

You should check out the 10 questions on the Writer’s Digest website.

Other Posts You Might Like:

When Ficition Doesn’t Feed You

Writing and the Day Job

I loved Nicola’s post earlier on this week. All the questions made me smile-wince, or swince as it will now be known. But there is one that always evokes a bigger swince than the others; and that is the dreaded ‘JK’ question.

Not that I mind being asked if I’m the new JK, well, not that much anyway. What I mind is the assumption that it’s only a matter of time before children’s writers buy great swathes of Morningside and use £50 notes to paper their new mansions; as though that’s the normal career path. Of course, my friends mean well. Of course, they’re being kind. But there is still a sense – among non-writers – that writing is a solid route to bucket-fulls of cash.

Ha!
Ha!
And thrice Ha!

I did an MA in creative writing. Throughout, visiting speakers and the course tutors would do their best to open our eyes to cold reality. ‘It’s tough to get published and it’s tough to make money even when you are published’, they said. Often.
But it’s only now, with a first book out and two more scheduled, that I’m starting to see their point.

But, I am not here to whine. Oh no.
On the contrary; today, I want to celebrate. I want us to applaud the wonder that is the Day Job.
Too often, it’s seen as a dreadful impediment to the ‘real work’ of a writer; your perceived success depends on how quickly you can give it up. But for many writers, you can never give up your day job. And we can sometimes be made to feel bad about that by friends and family who should know better.

Well, I love my day job, and I (probably) wouldn’t give it up even if those rolls of £50-note wallpaper do turn up. I sell tickets 3 days a week in an independent cinema. I work alongside interesting people and our customers are superb too. And, yes, I do get to see the films for free. Writing fits around the job perfectly and having to work makes my writing time even more precious.
Also, the fact I have to leave the house three times a week means I have to shower and get dressed. If I were a full-time writer I’m not so sure that would happen...

Lots of writers are teachers, or work in publishing, or even fly planes (I only know of one who does that, to be fair). We are all real writers, and we can all (mostly) pay the bills.

Long live the day job!

...for man nor beast. And I oughta know, being both a man and a beast, because I've just come out of it, pausing only to snap this picture on the way -- that's the view from 29th Street and 3rd Ave., with the Chrysler Building all but obscured by sleet.