More Than Pink Boas and Bonbons

I’m living the dream, people. I am a writer. I receive a regular check because people  pay for what I wrote.

I think, though, that a lot of people have a different idea of what “being a writer” involves. Maybe it’s that we all sit around all day in our pajamas alternately eating bonbons and shoving our cats off the keyboard. Oh, and we wear pink boas while we’re doing all that. We rarely go out in public, but when we do, people stop us in the street and ask us to sign our latest and greatest work for them, and we obligingly do, even if it will make us late for this posh and fabulous dinner party our publisher is throwing just for us.

I gotta say, it’s not really like that.

Most of us have a day job. If you’re looking for a Get Rich Quick scheme, I promise that writing is not what you want to be doing. I get a check once a quarter. It’s enough to let me claim I write for money, but it is not enough to live on, even for, like, a week.

I don’t eat bonbons while I’m writing. I’d get chocolate on the keyboard.

I do not own a pink boa.

I do not own a cat. (Well, no one really owns a cat, I guess, cats being the way they are. But there is not a cat in my household.)

I do sometimes write in my pajamas, but not very often, because it makes my husband look at me and go, “You’re not even dressed yet?” (Yeah, some people just don’t get that writing in your pajamas is considered glamorous. I dunno.)

Publishers (at least most of them) do not throw parties for their authors, although book parties and author parties seem to be in all movies involving authors. Weird.

Authors write for months, or even years, and then send their book around to be roundly rejected before finally finding the right publisher. When they do sell, most don’t make much in the way of money, and many keep their day jobs. It’s hard work, and not really all that glamorous.

But, you know what? We wouldn’t trade it for the world!

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