The Writing Life Too

Sky a pearly color this morning but it’s supposed to be sunny later. Colors here have not yet peaked and the palette is magical. Here’s the first paragraph from a terrific piece by Emily St John Mandal at The Millions, Working the Double Shift. In it she muses about how to keep writing while you need a day job that demands your time and energy. It’s a topic my friends and I have long discussed.

It begins: “Most novelists have day jobs, even the published ones whose books get good reviews. Writing is my second career, and one of the very few things that it has in common with my first career—contemporary dance—is the necessity of maintaining secondary employment. I’ve been supporting myself since I was eighteen years old: I’ve made sandwiches and cocktails and uncountable lattés, put price stickers on wine glasses, supervised the unloading of trucks at 7am on Montreal winter mornings, sold everything from clothing to furniture to vases in three cities, run errands for architects, scheduled meetings, designed and coded websites, written reports and managed offices; all the strangely varied occupations that a person accumulates when the primary objective is not to establish a career, per se, but just to pay the rent while they’re working on a novel.”
http://www.themillions.com/2009/10/working-the-double-shift.html