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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2ddsPcu:
s-leary replied to your post
“good things: posting chapter 7 gave me the impetus i needed to do a…”
Good lord, let’s all pitch in and find you a new job. Or help you hit it big with an original novel. Both? Both is good.
Sigh. I’d have to give up writing fanfic to write the novel, and I keep telling myself that’d be fine, and then I go two weeks without updating any of my fics and (naturally) it gets longer and longer without any Validation™ and I sink deeply into the mire of I Have Never Done Anything Useful and lie there and stare at the unending sky and wonder what the point is to existing anyway and so on and so forth. So no matter what I do, that’d be a hard transition. If I were in a new challenging exciting job, or even at the farm, I don’t notice it as much, but that’s because I have no time or mental space to write anything.
So… I only have time to write because of my unfulfilling and basically-non-paying job, but it drains my self-esteem to the point where I can only write things that’ll get me positive attention in the short-term. (And I can only steal time to write in tiny snippets usually, and original stuff requires a much deeper immersion than i can usually achieve in those tiny snippets of time.)
This isn’t a new observation, by the way; it’s been the reality since I actively lost my entire shit in about 2012 and started writing fanfic again because it was the only thing I could think of to keep myself animate. I’d stopped writing entirely for a couple of years, because roller derby took up all of my extra brainspace, and eventually that wasn’t enough and I had a little breakdown. (Not that anyone noticed, but I did.)
But. Anyway. I just sort of feel stuck.
sugarspiceandcursewords said: I support both of s-leary’s ideas. But the boss conversation does sound like there’s hope for progress, in an “oh shit we really have been fucking people over maybe we should think about fixing it more than a token amount” way. Here’s hoping.
Yeah no, though, I’ve been here long enough to know that they’re never going to actually pay me a living wage. That’s just not how it works. I’ve gotten my hopes up a bunch of times over various ideas and things, and that’s… I mean, the boss who would berate us and who seemed to think it was his Catholic duty to spread his own self-loathing to us and make us unwilling to ask for anything ever (and who told me I didn’t need a raise because I had a sugar daddy! I liked this guy but he would occasionally make it clear that he truly believed I was a degenerate child-hater because I was unmarried and childless and living out of wedlock with a man; he had no idea what to say when I pointed out that I wasn’t even really heterosexual)– at least that guy’s gone, but in his absence we’ve had nothing, which it turns out is actually slightly worse. Amazingly.
It’s a tiny business anyway, in a dying industry; we can evolve and change and all, but our margins are razor-thin and we just don’t spend money on anything ever, that’s our modus operandi.
So, no, I’m hoping I can manage to get a part-time paid position at the farm that I can do partly remotely (there’s a side business in holiday decor that I’m trying to expand, so I could conceivably work on a lot of that stuff from Buffalo, which I don’t want to give up), and carve out by some method some actual time to devote to writing, and then I could maybe actually make enough of a living like that. I have almost no expenses, I don’t need much.
I’ve known since college that fiction writers can at best hope for like $10k a year in income; the odds of being a bestseller are worse than getting hit by lightning or winning the lottery, but if you work hard and don’t have any bad luck you can scrape a low-level income in this market, whether with a publisher or self-pubbing, if you’re extremely talented and work very hard. That’s my aspiration. But I need about $15k a year to survive, so I have to start off with a part-time job that’ll guarantee most of that, but give me enough time to write. And I have to have had a bunch of time to write prior to even starting off on this, because I can’t get any income from writing if I don’t have any done.
And “time to write” looks to others, and feels to me, like “time to goof off”, and that is something I have actively fought with for a decade and a half now. Literally any other task seems more important than writing, and so I can only write if I’ve “earned” it in some way, and that means there are no other undone tasks. I have a deep-seated terror, which maturity allows me to see is pretty firmly rooted in having a learning disability, of being seen as irresponsible and lazy; I’m an untidy person and can’t help that, so I am constantly fighting to make myself worthy anyway by Visibly Working Harder Than Anyone Else.
s-leary replied to your post
“good things: posting chapter 7 gave me the impetus i needed to do a…”
Good lord, let’s all pitch in and find you a new job. Or help you hit it big with an original novel. Both? Both is good.
Sigh. I’d have to give up writing fanfic to write the novel, and I keep telling myself that’d be fine, and then I go two weeks without updating any of my fics and (naturally) it gets longer and longer without any Validation™ and I sink deeply into the mire of I Have Never Done Anything Useful and lie there and stare at the unending sky and wonder what the point is to existing anyway and so on and so forth. So no matter what I do, that’d be a hard transition. If I were in a new challenging exciting job, or even at the farm, I don’t notice it as much, but that’s because I have no time or mental space to write anything.
So… I only have time to write because of my unfulfilling and basically-non-paying job, but it drains my self-esteem to the point where I can only write things that’ll get me positive attention in the short-term. (And I can only steal time to write in tiny snippets usually, and original stuff requires a much deeper immersion than i can usually achieve in those tiny snippets of time.)
This isn’t a new observation, by the way; it’s been the reality since I actively lost my entire shit in about 2012 and started writing fanfic again because it was the only thing I could think of to keep myself animate. I’d stopped writing entirely for a couple of years, because roller derby took up all of my extra brainspace, and eventually that wasn’t enough and I had a little breakdown. (Not that anyone noticed, but I did.)
But. Anyway. I just sort of feel stuck.
sugarspiceandcursewords said: I support both of s-leary’s ideas. But the boss conversation does sound like there’s hope for progress, in an “oh shit we really have been fucking people over maybe we should think about fixing it more than a token amount” way. Here’s hoping.
Yeah no, though, I’ve been here long enough to know that they’re never going to actually pay me a living wage. That’s just not how it works. I’ve gotten my hopes up a bunch of times over various ideas and things, and that’s… I mean, the boss who would berate us and who seemed to think it was his Catholic duty to spread his own self-loathing to us and make us unwilling to ask for anything ever (and who told me I didn’t need a raise because I had a sugar daddy! I liked this guy but he would occasionally make it clear that he truly believed I was a degenerate child-hater because I was unmarried and childless and living out of wedlock with a man; he had no idea what to say when I pointed out that I wasn’t even really heterosexual)– at least that guy’s gone, but in his absence we’ve had nothing, which it turns out is actually slightly worse. Amazingly.
It’s a tiny business anyway, in a dying industry; we can evolve and change and all, but our margins are razor-thin and we just don’t spend money on anything ever, that’s our modus operandi.
So, no, I’m hoping I can manage to get a part-time paid position at the farm that I can do partly remotely (there’s a side business in holiday decor that I’m trying to expand, so I could conceivably work on a lot of that stuff from Buffalo, which I don’t want to give up), and carve out by some method some actual time to devote to writing, and then I could maybe actually make enough of a living like that. I have almost no expenses, I don’t need much.
I’ve known since college that fiction writers can at best hope for like $10k a year in income; the odds of being a bestseller are worse than getting hit by lightning or winning the lottery, but if you work hard and don’t have any bad luck you can scrape a low-level income in this market, whether with a publisher or self-pubbing, if you’re extremely talented and work very hard. That’s my aspiration. But I need about $15k a year to survive, so I have to start off with a part-time job that’ll guarantee most of that, but give me enough time to write. And I have to have had a bunch of time to write prior to even starting off on this, because I can’t get any income from writing if I don’t have any done.
And “time to write” looks to others, and feels to me, like “time to goof off”, and that is something I have actively fought with for a decade and a half now. Literally any other task seems more important than writing, and so I can only write if I’ve “earned” it in some way, and that means there are no other undone tasks. I have a deep-seated terror, which maturity allows me to see is pretty firmly rooted in having a learning disability, of being seen as irresponsible and lazy; I’m an untidy person and can’t help that, so I am constantly fighting to make myself worthy anyway by Visibly Working Harder Than Anyone Else.
