It Came from Plan B

A few years ago I had an epiphany about one of my life choices. I was a guest on my buddy Keith’s excellent podcast about the creative life, called the Performer’s Podcast.

We had a great conversation, and eventually the talk turned to the question of my writing. Had I ever considered giving up my day job and pursuing creative writing as my career? My answer was illuminating. “I’m not in a position to do that,” I said.

Keith was a bit flummoxed by that response, because, really, I could have decided to give up my day job at any time and just work as a creative writer. But what I meant was that it would mean giving up my house and lifestyle, at least for the foreseeable future, until I sold enough copies of my work to keep afloat financially.

“I guess I’m just too middle-class for that,” I concluded.

Blaming my parents

Then I may have thrown my parents under the bus. A little. Growing up, they didn’t mind me writing, but they always urged me to have some kind of career to “fall back on” in case writing novels turned out to be harder than I thought.  Much of my writing “career” has been about feeding my fiction habit when I could after work, or before work, or has been the case the last few years, in the summers when I haven’t been teaching.

This is a good and bad thing. There’s no question, if I was writing full-time, I’d be able to write a lot more. Over the past summer I drafted a new humorous SF story in less than four months. So, I could conceivably write two or maybe even three books a year at that pace. (Probably less, because revision is almost as time-consuming for me as drafting.)

On the other hand, what would I be writing?

There’s an argument to be made that because my writing time is less fulsome – and therefore more precious – that I’m only working on projects I really care about. Novels that drive me mad with their potential. The Fatness was certainly one such project. And even if I had no day job to distract me, it still would have taken me quite a bit of time to write that book. There were just too many demons to slay along the way.

I’ve had a rich and fascinating work life that I can’t regret, particularly since I started teaching. Even if one of my books becomes a huge bestseller and I can afford to give up my job, I don’t know that I’ll really want to. I legit look forward to going to class, to engage with young minds, and to learn from them as much as they learn from me. I know, it’s a cliché, but it is true. Their concerns and enthusiasms make their way into my fiction. If I wasn’t teaching, I don’t know that I would have been able to write The Fridgularity at all.

So, even if I have been working the “Plan B” side of the fence, I have no regrets. Having a job hasn’t stopped me from writing, and maybe, having a job has kept me writing when I might have given up in another universe.

You can find Keith’s Performer’s Podcast here — highly recommended!

My many universes?

I’ve now published at least five discrete universes, and then all of them, in Alpha Max.

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