The financial imperative

It's all very well writing a novel in my spare time, but now the end of the summer looms, and hard decisions have to be made about work, children, and childcare. I want to write. But I have also made the decision to send Michael to a very good school, and live in a nice house, and have some debts from my reckless university years. My husband makes fairly good money but still, something's gotta give.

There's an English teaching job waiting for me in September. Teaching is fairly enjoyable, especially teaching adults who want to be there, which is what I'd be doing. I'm usually an uncomfortable introvert but teaching brings out the chatty person in me. In the role of a teacher I can be a different sort of person: more confident and relaxed. I guess I feel that I'm protected the very defined role; I hate unstructured social situations and can, in the company of certain people, clam up completely. Anyway, the point is that teaching is pleasant enough, as is driving my bike around Palma on the way to the school, in the permanent sunshine. More than that, it pays some bills. Like the hefty school bill we're now committed to.

But what about writing? This is what really gets to me. I can't, in practical terms, treat writing as a job, and commit serious, exclusive time to it. I would like to, but the reality of it is that writing doesn't pay. Once you've written an entire book (say maybe 1000 hours of work, at the very least) and in the statistically unlikely event that a publisher takes it on, some money might just materialise. Conceivably a lot, probably fairly little.
I want to believe that I'm writing an excellent book, and only by believing this can I carry on, despite tiredness, despite having a million other things I could be doing. But I also have to take a step back and look at the reality of it: 5% of all books that are mailed to publishers ever see the inside of a bookstore. A tiny, minute, almost entirely negligible proportion of these hit the bestseller lists and make any signficant amount of money. I don't write for the money, of course. I love it in itself. But I can't, at the moment, afford the luxury of not making any money and writing instead.

Whatever will be, will be. I'll carry on with the novel, that's for sure, however slowly I have to do it.

Until next time

Sylvia