Not-writing

As a newly, self-published e-author, you could probably guess that I'm not quite to the point of quitting my day job (yet).  That being the case, I still need to do something other than writing.

What do I do to pay the bills?  Not-Writing.

For myself, and, I assume, other people trying to break into the authoring game, the world breaks down into two jobs, Writing and Not-Writing.  It doesn't really matter what the actual job is.  I could be working the counter at McDonalds, or a CEO pulling in six-figures, and it would still amount to the same thing, Not-Writing.

I had this little epiphany a while back, and at first it depressed the hell out of me.  It made me fully aware that it didn't matter what I did, or how well-paying the job was, or how happy I should be to have as good of a job as I had.  I still wasn't going to be happy with a career, unless that career involved weaving words together on paper*.

Then I had another epiphany, and as far as double-epiphanies go, this was a pretty good one.  It dawned on me that, even though I'm spending 40 hours a week Not-Writing, at least now I know what will make me happy.

Maybe that's the key to finding your way, career-wise.  Maybe instead of trying to figure out what we should be doing, we should figure out what we're Not-Doing.  Are you Not-Teaching?  Not-Farming?  Not-Singing?  Not-Accounting?  That's probably nonsense psychobabble, but it worked for me to look at it from that perspective.

Once I boiled it down to those two options, it cleared everything up for me.  If I wanted to be happy, I had to find a job that wasn't Not-Writing.  Once I knew that, it was easy to justify 4-5 hours of sleep a night while I wrote my book, (see previous entry).

Will I get to the point when I can quit Not-Writing?  I hope so.  Even if I can't, I found what I'm supposed to be doing.  It doesn't matter if I make another dime or not, Writing is my career as far as I'm concerned.  Not-Writing is just a chore that needs to be done.

  

*For the kids.  Paper was a medium that people used to use to put words on, before the Interwebs and Twitters and Facebooks came along