The Day Job: What About the Day Job?

Two weeks ago, Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, addressed a hundred or so high school writers at the Mesa State College High School Creative Writing Conference.  In the midst of giving them his opinions about what worked for him as an author, and, hopefully, giving [...]

The Day Job: Keeping the Writer Alive

Maybe the toughest part of being a part-time writer who has to have a non-writing day job is keeping the writer part of me alive and enthusiastic. It’s that darned world out there full of distractions and creativity-sucking messages like, “Why don’t you come watch some television with us?” or “A bunch of us [...]

The Day Job: Art and Competitiveness in a Scary Publishing World

Have you been following the publishing news lately?  Magazine distributors charging more per copy, which will close up some magazine shops; publishers firing employees and closing some of their lines; a major fantasy print magazine ceases publication; another one goes from a monthly to a bimonthly schedule; a major book store franchise in trouble and [...]

The Day Job: Publishing a Short Story Collection

Here are two killer trivial pursuit questions for the next time you are at a party with folks who are not writers: how many bestseller single-author short story collections are there, and what is the name of a single-author short story collection you have read?
The answers to the questions are “none” and “I [...]

The Day Job: Sense of Wonder, Writing Landscapes, and the Imaginative Muscle

There’s a great line in an old science fiction comedy, Inner Space. In the movie, Martin Short plays a hypochondriac nebbish grocery store clerk who ends up with a miniaturized, manned submarine in him. The submarine pilot, Dennis Quaid, in one of his better comic roles, establishes contact with Short and for the [...]

The Day Job: What Are You Writing For?

When I first started teaching a college creative writing class, I had a long meeting with a veteran in the department about how he taught the class. He’d had a strangle hold on creative writing since the Eisenhower administration, and his ideas, as he said, had “stood the test of time.”
He was particularly proud [...]

The Day Job: Rookie Mistakes

Going from an unpublished newbie to a regularly selling pro isn’t easy for most writers. There can be a distressingly long gap between deciding to try for publication and actually achieving publication. Then, after the first sale, there can be another uncomfortable gap before the second. For me, I made my first [...]

The Day Job: On Establishing a Personal Canonical Collection of Short Stories

Did I mention that I spent a great deal of my young adult life as a swimming coach? From the time I was 18 until I turned 32, I worked hours and hours a day at the swimming pool, training competitive swimmers. Odd way to start an article on writing, isn’t it? [...]

The Day Job: Convention Dos and Don’ts

Fortunately, you do not need to be a full-time professional to enjoy one of the great resources and opportunities for writers, a science fiction convention. If you do some investigation, you probably can find one in your area several times a year. A good place to start might be the SF Site’s convention [...]

The Day Job: Making a Writing Group Work

One time when I was in a writers’ group, a member submitted a manuscript that he was a little nervous about. He said it had some four-letter words in it. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but he was conscientious. At the next meeting, the critiques progressed swimmingly until we got [...]

The Day Job: InterNetTion

So, you’ve been slaving over your writing for weeks on end, isolating yourself in your writer’s garret, awash in the miasma of tossed away drafts and abandoned ideas. You know it’s time to get out and renew your creative engines, but the next convention is weeks away, or maybe you’ve never been to a [...]

The Day Job: Carpe Penicullus

I experienced a chilling moment while on a flight this year. The attendant said, “If Denver is your final destination, thank you for traveling with us.” She creeped me out. “Final destination,” indeed! Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything that “Even a long human life adds up [...]

The Day Job: Quitting It

Keep telling yourself, it’s not about the money.

When I first got it into my head that I wanted to be a writer, I had a pretty specific (if contradictory) vision of what that would be like. On one hand, the life looked incredibly romantic. You know, that sensitive Byronic picture of the writer [...]

The Day Job: Get Out of the House

When writing isn’t the day job, then your writing “office” is probably in your house. Of course, for writers who do make their living through words, their office is probably at home too. For many, the idea of working from home is the ideal. Sleep late. Trundle down to the computer [...]

The Day Job: Writing Thoughts to Contemplate

I like short, pithy advice about writing. Maybe I’m just a simple guy, but I think more about the easily digested suggestions I’ve read than the long, theoretical essays contained in the several dozen writing books on my shelves. For example, when I had a chance to have Connie Willis sign a copy [...]