Yesterday I Skyped for almost an hour and a half with a fellow writer. The two of us met about eight years ago while touring for Children's Book Week. Our real life paths haven't crossed again since, but we have kept in touch through the social networks, email, a telephone call once a few years back, and most recently Skype.

After our face-to-face computer exchange, I was simultaneously inspired and depressed. He is so busy doing writerly things, I feel like a slug by comparison. On the other hand, I was excited to imagine all the avenues open to me that I wasn't tapping.

You see, he and I have one very big thing in common. We write for a living. We have to earn money at our craft in order to pay the rent and put food on the table. We can't NOT succeed, which means we can't just work on that novel when the mood takes us. Weekdays or weekends -- they're all workdays. And that's not a bad thing. We like what we do or we wouldn't be doing it. There are other jobs out there that pay regularly.

Unless you're JK Rowling, writing children's books is not a lucrative career, and if you don't have some other income to supplement it, you're screwed. So you take on other writerly jobs to help keep the wolf from the door. Most of us do school visits. That definitely helps, but schools seem to have less and less money these days. We also give workshops and speak at conferences. Again there are only so many of those opportunities to go around. I wrote an online science/mystery/adventure serial for a year. That paid well. I've done some work for the Ontario Department of Education, and written course profiles for colleges around the world. (That one was more work than it was worth.) I've done some editorial work and been paid for some book reviews. I worked briefly with a weekly journal for young people. I've done a bit of technical writing.

But that is just the tip of the ice berg. I need to do more. I've had offers to write regular articles for a periodical and to do some ghost writing, but for various reasons, I've given those opportunities a miss. I would like to give some courses -- after all, I was a teacher for a long time -- so I need to present a program idea to the local colleges, and I think I will. I need to be more active about pursuing other speaking engagements too. I'd like to look into website writing perhaps and contact the Department of Ed about curriculum/exam writing, etc.I need to send out some queries for non-fiction too.

Mostly, I'd just like to be able to write the stories meandering through my mind, but winter's coming and maintaining a roof over my head would be good, and that means writing for my life.