I finished the 6th chapter of my novel. As usual, I got hung up about halfway in. After a bit of inspiration I managed to work through my knot and the result took me a few thousand words beyond where I expected to go. Somehow I’m a full 20% done with the novel and looking forward to the remaining 80k words…
I am running up against time barriers though – school classes will be starting next week which will eat up some 9 hours . I’ve also got more freelance work to get done than I had over most of last year. Any more growth and we may have to legitimately consider hiring someone.
It is strange to be both an employee, a freelancer/company owner, and a writer. Plenty of writers have historically been employed or pseudoemployed, (Henry Miller and the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company comes to mind) and, at least amongst the authors I’ve read, they’ve been pretty terrible at their jobs (Again, Henry Miller and the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company is a good example.) I don’t think any of the writers whose biographies I’m familiar with have had any particular success outside of writing, certainly not as entrepreneurs. The closest thing would be someone like Michael Stackpole who does rather well selling guides on writing. He definitely has business acumen, but his business, in this case, is substantially related to writing. I have to wonder if there aren’t any noteworthy authors who worked for themselves, outside of writing, with any success?
I would say probably someone, but probably few enough. Both jobs are too time-consuming to mesh very well – as I’m finding. I do write as part of both and there aren’t as many differences between a persuasive business email and a persuasive story as one might think. For both jobs having an expansive knowledge of nearly everything is practically a requirement. For both there’s a conflict between specialization and breadth – and the consequences of being marketed as such. There’s plenty of links , but I just can’t name all that many people who have been successful in two disparate fields. I suppose that just means I’ve got a challenge ahead of me which, of course, I already knew.
Anyway, enough from me. For the sake of my routine, here’s that bit of internet that struck me fancy for the week: http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/ It’s a blog about Henry Miller (mentioned twice above) and it’s fascinating. Also it’s depressing that a blog about a dead guy is substantially more enthralling than mine…sigh. That’s just how it goes it seems.
