One thing I’m not going to do…

One aspect of figuring out what to do in a second career is understanding what NOT to do. As I noted in the intro, one decision I made a while back was that even though my hockey writing was one of the largest segments of my blog’s audience at the time, I chose not to try to make it a focus of my plans. It might have been a leg to build an income stream on in the short term, but over the longer term, it conflicted with other, more important goals (like getting out of Silicon Valley), and I didn’t see any logic in trying to building a hockey audience knowing I was going to “retire” from it at some point.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m interested in a lot of things. Some days I think my brain is a magpie, always looking at some new shiny thing to go and explore. there are days when I feel like I need to put a huge sign that says FOCUS on the wall over my desk, just to remind me to stick to what needs to be done and not spend a few hours “researching”. (although research is necessary and useful, but not to the exclusion of getting real work done).

One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last year — and reluctantly putting back on the list of things I want to do but can’t justify doing — is going back to fiction writing. At one point I was an active fiction writer, and unlike a lot of them, I was selling some of it. I gave it up for a simple reason: the pay sucked, it was a lot of hard work, and I enjoyed computers and geeking at least as much as I enjoyed writing and being a writer, and computers pay a hell of a lot better.

Fiction writing is a tough market. It hasn’t gotten any better in the time I’ve been away, in fact it’s harder now to succeed as a writer than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and the pay scale is about the same. Not “same adjusted for inflation”, but pretty much the same. A few writers make really good money, a good chunk of writers make enough money to keep writing, and a huge number of writers are fighting for waiter jobs with those actors and actresses and muscians and artists who are all in the same boat in their respective fields.

John Scalzi sums it up wonderfully.

I go back to what I felt when I decided to retire from writing: I enjoy being a writer (the act of writing isn’t as pleasant as having written) — but I don’t see anyway someone who WANTS to be a writer can successfully compete in a tight market against someone who HAS TO BE a writer. And I want to be a writer, it just isn’t something that wraps me in knots at night when I’m not writing. So even though my unfinished novel has been calling to me in the interstices of the midnight hour, one of the things I’ve decided I’m not going to do — is try to go back to fiction writing.

Although I’d like to. But I don’t HAVE to — and that’s something everyone should be brutally honest with themselves about when playing the “I want to be…. ” game. “Want to” isn’t a success strategy. In a creative industry, if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep inside, if the hunger isn’t there, chances are you won’t succeed, because someone who is driven by that hunger is going to fight for the same opportunities, and they’ll win most of the time.

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