Tag Archives: writing

Pronoun Woes

Posted on by
11

This old reader/writer knows the difference between singular and plural pronouns.

I just finished an audio book that kind of bugged me. The problem: the use of plural pronouns to apply to a singular person.

It was jarring. Most of the characters had the usual singular pronouns of he/him/his or she/her/hers so the text I heard as I listened was extremely easy to follow when the reader read about those characters. But one main character used the they/them/their pronouns. As a result, anytime the reader referred to that person, it sounded as if he were talking about multiple people. My listening brain came to a complete halt every time.

I’m old school. Although I understand the reason why people don’t want to use a male or female pronoun, I really wish we’d come up with a pronoun that didn’t already exist as a plural.

It’s difficult to understand text that refers to one person with a plural pronoun when the text could easily refer to multiple people. Many times that the reader referred to this character, I had to figure out if it was just that one person or multiple people. It was extremely distracting from the story.

I want to blame the writer, but I know why he did it. He wants to help make gender neutrality more acceptable to the general public. He wants us to get used to it. It’s a noble goal. But it drives some of us nuts. I would definitely have enjoyed the book more — with a lot less distraction — if he stuck to standard pronoun usage for his characters. Hell, he already had two lesbian couples in the book. How much did he need to support gender issues in what was basically a science fiction drama?

And now I know folks are going to step forward here and comment that we’ve been using “they” to refer to singular unspecified gender individuals for years and that it’s in the dictionary or that it’s in some widely used style guide. But it’s only been in common usage for people who don’t want a specific gender identity for a short while now. And I’ve been reading and writing for more than 50 years. It’s not as if I can flip a switch in my brain and it all works out fine for me. “They” refers to more than one person in my brain and most of the brains out there.

Clearly, we need a new set of singular pronouns. Can we fix this please?

Facing Retirement

Posted on by
4

“Retirement,” which seemed so far off just last year, is now close at hand and remarkably easier than I thought it would be.


John’s Carver at its slip in Charleston, SC, on the night I boarded for our five week trip together.

Back in Spring 2022 — just 14 months ago? — I was on a cruise with Capt John on his 36′ Carver Aft Cabin cruiser on a trip up the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). (You can read more about that in my Great Loop blog.) It was April and I was trying to enjoy the cruise while worrying about a bunch of work-related things back home:

  • Cherry season was coming up and I had all the usual concerns about the season. Would the cherry crop be viable? Would all my clients sign up? Would I get back clients who hadn’t signed up last year because of the frost? How much acreage would I have to cover? Would I need pilots in Wenatchee, Quincy, and Mattawa or just Wenatchee and Quincy? Would I be able to find enough pilots?
  • My helicopter N7534D, was aging and had just 20 hours left until a required overhaul that would cost $270K. I had already decided to sell it after cherry season, but was 20 hours enough for the season? What would I do if I flew that off?
  • Would I be able to sell my Part 135 charter business (which had become a pain in the ass because of the ineptitude and spite of inspectors at the Spokane FSDO) with a nearly timed-out helicopter? Would the guy who kept claiming he wanted to buy it all actually come up with the money?
  • Would I be able to find another helicopter to replace it without going back into deep debt? Or should I just retire from cherry drying? Would I be able to sell my cherry drying business to someone else who wanted to take my place?

All this was going through my mind as we cruised at 6 knots up the ICW, spending a few days at stops along the way. To be fair, my cherry season stress normally starts in March and April, but this year it seemed more stressful than usual, mostly because of the age of the helicopter and its upcoming need for an overhaul.

My idea of “retirement”

Wonder why I keep putting “retire” and “retirement” in quotes? It’s because my idea of retirement isn’t the same as most people’s.

I’ll never stop working. Whether I write or make jewelry or do odd jobs in the gig economy, I’ll always have something to keep me busy that brings in a few bucks. (Hell, this summer I’m even selling eggs from my chickens at $5 a dozen.) I’d already considered getting my boat captain’s license — yes, for a boat I didn’t even own yet — and doing charter cruises to earn cruising money.

I won’t stop working until either my mind or body makes it impossible. Working keeps us alive; you can ask my wasband about his dad’s short retirement to get an idea of what I mean by that. (I hope you’re resting in peace, Charlie.)

In general, although I had thoughts about retirement, it was still far off on the horizon. I couldn’t imagine being “retired.”

I did, however, have a rough plan for buying my own boat and cruising the Great Loop in it. I’d even looked at boats. But I couldn’t buy a boat unless I sold the helicopter and I still couldn’t buy a boat if I wanted to get another helicopter and stay in the business. So I figured the boat purchase would be sometime in 2024, after that cherry season. Maybe that’s when I’d “retire,” too.

Everything Changes

Everything changed with a phone call. A guy with a lot of money offered me a lot of money for the helicopter if I sold it then. He wasn’t interested in the charter business, but the amount he offered for a helicopter that I was hoping to unload in a few months anyway was too much to ignore. On May 6, I watched it fly away for the last time with the money secured in my bank account.


It was a lot easier to say goodbye to this helicopter when the money was in the bank and my thoughts were on the kind of boat I’d buy to replace it. Also, no more $20K per year insurance bills. Yippee!

I arranged to lease a helicopter for the season. (There were problems with that, but I won’t go into it here.) I got contracts, I got pilots. The season started off good and then fizzled out in mid June when it stopped raining. The season ended in August. I heaved a sigh of relief again.

I listed my charter business with a broker. I knew that I’d have to get a helicopter to keep my Part 135 certificate and I’d decided that I was done owning helicopters. The broker listed it for a lot more than I expected.

Meanwhile, with all that helicopter sales money sitting in the bank, I started shopping for a boat. By the end of August, I’d made a deal on one.

Around that time, the broker found a few buyers for my company. One backed out. The other was an idiot tire-kicker who called me directly with a crazy lowball offer. But the third was serious. As I was signing papers on DocuSign to buy the boat, I was signing other papers on DocuSign to sell my company.

And suddenly, I found myself with a nearly new Ranger Tug, a new company that offered just cherry drying and aerial photo services, and a bunch more money in the bank than I expected to have at the end of cherry season. I’d also shed a costly-to-keep helicopter, a charter business I no longer wanted, and the anxiety of dealing with unreasonable, demanding people at the FAA.

I celebrated by spending September learning to cruise in my new boat. Then I shipped it to Chicago and got it on the Great Loop.


While I’m home this summer, I can be reminded of my first day on the Loop with the new Home Screen on my phone.

I named my boat Do It Now. Frankly, I was done waiting. Hell, I’d been done way back in 2010 but had a husband to shed to move forward. It had taken me 12 years to get through the divorce debacle and become financially secure in my home — which I’d paid off in July 2022 — before I could get back on track for what I wanted out of life.

But I didn’t think that I was one big step closer to “retirement.”

Retirement Thoughts Kick In

It wasn’t until this past winter that I started thinking about the possibility of tapping into the retirement money I’d been saving in earnest since the late 1980s. I own some stock — including Apple stock I originally bought at $13/share in the mid to late 1990s that had grown substantially with numerous splits and stock price increases. And I had some savings. And my living expenses were pretty low since just about everything I owned was completely paid for.

I’d been under the impression that I had to wait until I was 65 to start tapping into my retirement funds. Or maybe it was 62? I asked a knowledgeable friend. No, he told me. 59 1/2 is the age you can start using that money.

Holy cow. I was there.

I had a great winter cruising on the Great Loop in Do It Now, covering 3000+ miles, mostly solo. I made friends, saw a lot of new places, and met challenges along the way. I took a seven-day captain’s license class and passed the test.

But as March and April came along, I had the same cherry season worries as usual, but with a twist: I didn’t have a helicopter to fly. How was I going to deal with that?

Various solutions came about and I explored them all. But it wasn’t until I started contracting with clients that I realized what a non-issue it would all be. One of my clients did not sign up again. Since he accounted for about 2/3 of the acreage I cover, my season would be a lot shorter with fewer pilots and less revenue to pay them. I’d be able to keep a lot less money.

At first, I was angry. But then I reasoned it out. I wanted to to retire at the end of the season anyway. I was hoping to be able to sell the business, but if I had a good enough season, I might talk myself into keeping it and doing it again. But this one client had helped me make two decisions that took a lot of stress out of my life:

  • Without the added acreage, the business wasn’t worth selling so I didn’t have to stress over finding a buyer (or dealing with the tire-kicker who claimed 3 years ago that he wanted to buy my whole business).
  • With less revenue coming in, it was less attractive to keep doing the work. I was no longer tempted to do it another year. Retirement at the end of the season was a definite.

And I’ll be honest here: the client who had backed out was a pain in the ass anyway. Now I wouldn’t have to deal with his antics.

No, I haven’t been drying cherries for 25 years. It was only 15 years. Before (and during) that time, my summers were ruined by book deadlines, mostly for Quicken Official Guide, which I wrote the first 11 editions of starting in 1998.)

I was looking at the reality of having a summer off in 2024 for the first time in 25 years. It took no time at all to imagine my trip up to New York that summer for the ultimate Champlain, Erie, and Severn Canal cruise in my boat.

And with that, I had scheduled my retirement: August 2023. I would be 62 years old.

The Money Stuff

The question was, could I afford retirement without changing my lifestyle? I have to admit that cruising in a boat thousands of miles over the course of months is not exactly cheap. If I wasn’t going to make enough cherry drying money this summer to cover the next year of cruising, where would the money come from?

The answer was easy: my retirement funds.

They’d been growing and shrinking and growing and shrinking but mostly growing over the past 30 years. If I continued to earn some income from other sources, I wouldn’t need much every year — probably not even enough to start getting social security anytime soon. After all, other than cruising my cost of living was modest. (It really pays, folks, to eliminate all your debt before you retire.)

I had a talk with my accountant yesterday and a “retirement specialist” at my investment firm today. I discovered that my lowered income would save a lot of money on taxes, get me a better ACA health care subsidy until Medicare kicked in in 2026, and enable me to make retirement plan withdrawals without huge tax hits. I also discovered that tapping into my IRA would be as easy as filling in a form on my investment website. The money would arrive within days as a direct deposit to my bank account.

Of course, the money I’ve invested in my retirement funds is not unlimited. I will eventually run out. How quickly that happens depends on the stock market and how much I take each year. But I still have Social Security waiting for me and can always sell my home on the next market upturn. I think I’ll have enough for the rest of my life.

That is the goal, isn’t it? To die with just enough money to dispose of your body and give your friends a big party to say goodbye?

Facing retirement? Yes, but also embracing retirement. I just didn’t expect it to be this soon.

Stop Working for Free

Posted on by

I get an email message from someone sounding pretty desperate for a job that isn’t going to help his career move forward.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you should know that I occasionally get email messages or texts so outrageous that I feel a real need to share them here as a lesson to whoever can learn a lesson. (Admittedly, many can’t.)

This is one of those occasions.

The Email Message

Here’s the message that arrived via a Contact link on this blog:

Hey Maria,
How’s it going? I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to reach out because I’m a relatively low-time private pilot with around 400 hours under my belt. I used to own a R22 helicopter for several years, but I actually sold it a couple of years ago.
Recently, I came across an article about cherry picking and it got me thinking. I would love to be considered as a potential candidate to join your team. I’m willing to work for free and cover all my expenses, including food and lodging, until we both agree that I’m ready for the job. I completely understand that you have no obligations or liabilities when it comes to me, and I’ll make sure to have full insurance coverage. My main goal is to become a better pilot and find a true purpose in flying. If you have a moment, I’d appreciate it if you could take a look at my profile here: https://[redacted]. In any case, congratulations on your blog. I absolutely love your lifestyle and it’s truly inspiring.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Take care,
[redacted]

Tearing it Apart

There’s so much wrong with this, that I barely know where to start.

First of all, I have to assume that he means cherry drying and not cherry picking. I don’t do cherry picking. It’s hard work and better left for the professionals. The only cherries I pick are the ones my clients let me pick after they pick. I eat those. It’s one of the perks of the cherry drying business.

But what got me really fired up about this email is this guy’s offer to come here on his dime, cover all his living expenses, and “work for free.” He’s never really clear about what he wants to do, apparently for me, with his uncompensated time, but I have to again assume that it isn’t washing my cars or mowing my lawn. I suspect he wants to be a cherry drying pilot.

Even setting aside his extremely naive belief that a 400-hour R22 helicopter pilot can somehow get insurance to cover him for cherry drying work, the whole email reeks of desperation and ignorance.

Even if I had a helicopter for him to fly — and I definitely do not — what in the world makes him think I’d put him in it? I get first dibs on any idle helicopter that needs flying. And if I had a second spare helicopter, don’t you think I’d look for someone who had some actual experience in that make and model? I wouldn’t even consider using an R22 for cherry drying. It’s just too small.

Maybe he thinks I have a fleet of helicopters just sitting here, waiting for low time pilots to climb on board and fly them. I don’t.

But what tells me he didn’t do his homework was the simple fact that he seems to think that spending a summer as a cherry drying pilot will make him “a better pilot.” How much flying does he think there is? Although he offered “congratulations” on my blog — which turns twenty years old this year in October — he obviously didn’t bother to read much of it. Especially not the posts like this one where I specifically say that drying cherries isn’t for low-time pilots and is not good way to build flying time.

On my Contact Page
Yes, this is right on the page that he used to contact me. I guess reading the page contents was too much work for this guy looking for a job without pay. (This is a good reminder to update that page; Flying M Air has been sold and I’m retiring at the end of this cherry season.)

And no, I can’t expect him to wade through all 2500+ posts on this blog. Or do a search for “cherry drying” and read the posts that come up. Or click the cherry drying tag in the sidebar to quickly see posts tagged that way. But I seriously doubt he did more than watch a YouTube video of me drying cherries, find my blog, and click the Contact link to share his ridiculous offer with me. (He apparently didn’t read the paragraphs on that page regarding Career Advice and Pilot jobs, either.) He’s not the first lazy, ignorant job hunter I’ve encountered but I’m hoping that he’ll be the last.

Do I sound unreasonably harsh? Well, all I can say is what the fuck? I remember what I went through to get the various jobs I’ve had in my lifetime. Emailing someone with an offer to work for free at a job that doesn’t exist and that I don’t quality for anyway was never in my game plan. I have a whole series of posts titled “So You Want to Be a Helicopter Pilot.” Maybe he should start by reading those?

Stop Working for Free

But all of the above is not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to remind people that they should never offer to do a job for free.

No, I’m not talking about volunteering at the local Food Bank or Habitat project or any other charity operation. I’m talking about working for free — especially using highly specialized skills that you acquired at the cost of your time and money — for a for-profit business. Like a helicopter charter or agriculture company.

Believe me, companies have enough money to pay employees. If a company does not have enough money to pay its employees, it’s not a company you want to work for.

Any company that takes advantage of people offering to work for free — especially if that includes covering their own expenses — is not a company that you want to work for.

I firmly believe that everyone should be compensated for their work at for-profit organizations. That goes for pilots, writers, photographers, and any other job that takes a person’s time and effort or makes use of something that person created. Harlan Ellison said it best, and I know I’ve linked to this video more than once. Watch the video. Understand what he’s saying.

When you work for free, you tell people that your work is worthless. It’s not worth paying for. Is that the message you want to send? Do you expect to work for free for your entire life? That’s the path you set yourself on when you work for free.

Just stop it.

Keeping Up with Blogging

Posted on by
9

I offer up an excuse for neglecting this blog.

It’s been a whole month since the last time I posted here. And I only posted twice in January. And not at all in December. Do you see a pattern here?

This blog will be 20 years old in October and has thousands of posts — probably millions of words — and I seem to be running out of steam.

Well, I am and I’m not.

My current priority is blogging about my Great Loop boat trip in Do It Now, which I’m about 135 days into. At this point, I’ve traveled over 2400 miles and have done about 2/3 of that solo — just me and my pups. I’m having a great time facing the challenges and reaping the rewards of the trip. I’ve got about 5 weeks left before I head home for the summer and my summer job. (Yes, I’m still drying cherries.) I’l be back at it in mid-September; I just hope I can catch up with the blog before then.

A brief word about my production rate

I’ve noticed that as I age — or maybe just as time goes on and the world/technology changes? — my writing production rate has slowed considerably. As I type this, it’s hard to see that — I’m really churning out the words this morning.

But writing those trip blog posts leads to distractions. I’m pretty sure its caused by the work I need to do to add photos and links. I have to stop writing to find, format, and add the photos. I have to stop writing to look up the name of a restaurant or tour company or marina and possibly find and add a link to it.

Any time my attention is taken away from my blog composition software, it wanders. While I’m getting a photo off my phone, I may notice an incoming text from a friend. That leads to catching up on texts and responding to them. Somehow I drift into email. Or while I’m looking up a restaurant name, I get pulled into social media, which is always open on a browser tab.

These are distractions I can fight if I’m aware of how they’re destroying my productivity. I’ve been better about fighting them lately, but still not good enough. Heck, even this little sidebar box is a distraction, taking me away from the main point of my blog post. Enough!

That priority is working me hard. I’m trying to write for at least 2 hours every morning, but these days 2 hours just isn’t enough to knock out a complete and illustrated blog post, with links to related content. As a result, I’m falling farther and farther behind. My last blog post on My Great Loop Adventure was published two days ago (March 16, 2023) and it covered the events of January 8, 2023. So yes, I’m more than two months behind.

What’s Sucking My Time

Understand that I’ve got other priorities, too. First, I need to move the boat from place to place. On a long travel day, or one where weather could be a factor later in the day, I might want to start early — possibly so early that I don’t get my two hours of writing in. I can’t write while I drive the boat and lately I’ve been driving the boat for 4 to 7 hours in a day.

Then there are the boat chores when I arrive. The biggest one is hosing down the boat, which I try to do on arrival any day I cruised on salt water. I’ve been cruising on the Gulf and Atlantic Intracoastal Waterways since December so that means pretty much any day I cruise. Hosing and brushing down the surfaces that got splashed enroute can take an hour. I usually follow that up with topping off my fresh water tank, since the hose is already set up.

There are inside boat chores, too. Washing dishes, doing laundry, vacuuming, taking out the trash, grocery shopping. Sounds like what you do at home, right? Well, this is my home, at least while I travel on the water. I did the same stuff when I took my camper south every year. There’s no escaping from it; there will always be chores to take care of a home.

I also need to do trip planning and make reservations as necessary. I don’t do this every day, but when I do it, it can easily take an hour out of my day.


Rosie and Lily on the steps leading up to the command bridge. They have become real boat dogs.

And then there are my pups, Lily and Rosie. They need to be fed twice a day and taken out for pee breaks at least three times a day. If I’m at anchor, that might mean a dinghy ride and all the extra chores related to that.


Charleston has some amazing architecture. The other day, I got a chance to explore it on foot.

In addition to all that, I need to have some fun. I want to explore the places I visit, usually by walking around, sometimes with my pups. Sometimes I take tours — like the Segway Tour I took in Savannah earlier this month. I love to go into shops and galleries and museums and just look at things. Occasionally I buy — yesterday I bought a new mat for outside the boat’s back door and a pair of shoes for art show work this summer. I eat out — usually lunch — to get a taste of the local food. (I can’t tell you how many oysters and versions of shrimp and grits I’ve tasted.) I also go on bike rides and do a bit of hiking.

And, of course, I need to wind down at day’s end and sleep. I normally sleep very well on the boat and can usually get at least 7 hours of solid rest.

So when you add up all the time I spend doing those other things, you can see that there’s not much time left to write — and most of that writing time is spent trying (in vain, apparently) to get my trip blog up to date.

This blog has fallen to the bottom of my priorities list.

Don’t Give Up Hope

I hope that the folks who normally read this blog have begun reading about my trip. Some posts are definitely more interesting than others. I think the photos really help tell the story. Of course, when I’m done with the trip — and my blog about it — the posts will be pulled offline and turned into a book. What you’re reading on that blog is the first draft.

I’ll try to get to this blog with non-boating posts again soon. But you probably shouldn’t expect much until this summer when I’ll have a lot more time on my hands.

I think.

On Ghostwriting

Posted on by
4

There are only two reasons to do it.

Yes, I’m a helicopter pilot and jewelry artist now. But my second career, which has pretty much wound down at this point, was as a freelance writer. That career, which was in full swing when I started this blog in 2003 (not a typo) was successful enough for me to buy multiple investment properties, completely fund my retirement, take flying lessons, and buy a helicopter.

So yes, I think it’s fair to say that I know a bit about the business of writing.

The Crazy Ghostwriting Offer

So imagine my surprise when I see a tweet from a wannabe writer offering to “ghostwrite your sci fi, fantasy story, ebook, novel” for $5.

My first thought was what kind of desperate idiot would write someone else’s book for $5?

Let’s be clear here: writing may not be terribly difficult — it wasn’t for me — but it is time consuming. The fastest I ever churned out a book was a 280-pager in 10 days. It was my third or fourth book. Would I have taken $5 for 10 days of work? Hell no.

Would I have taken $5 for any piece of writing that had someone else’s name on it? Fuck no.

Ghostwriting Explained

Ghostwrite definition
Definition from Merriam-Webster: ghostwrite.

That’s what ghostwriting is all about: writing something for someone else and having that person’s (or another person’s) name on on it as the author. In most (or probably all) cases, copyright goes to the person or organization who hired the ghostwriter. This is a work for hire, which is relatively common in the publishing world.

Ghostwriters are commonly used by famous people with a story to tell — often biographical in nature — who lack the skill, time, and/or desire to sit down and write it. Remember, writing isn’t easy for everyone, there are lots of really crappy writers out there, and writing takes time, no matter how good or bad a writer is. Ghostwriter names don’t usually appear as author, although sometimes they’ll appear in smaller print after “as told to” or something like that.

There’s no glory in being a ghostwriter.

Dvorak's Inside Track
This is the first book I was involved in; I was a ghostwriter on 4 chapters and am mentioned in the acknowledgements.

I know this firsthand. My first book project was as a ghostwriter for John C Dvorak and Bernard J David on Dvorak’s Inside Track to the Mac back in 1991. Bernard hired me, after his agent suggested me, to write one chapter of the book. They liked what I turned in so much that they hired me for another three chapters. (You can read about this in a post titled “Freebies” on this site. I highly recommend reading this if you’re starting out as a writer and hope to make a living at it.)

Much later in my career, I ghostwrote a chapter or two for someone else’s book — was it the Macintosh Bible? I can’t even remember. In that case, I had expertise that the author lacked and the writing experience to get the job done right and on time.

Why Be a Ghostwriter?

Would I ghostwrite something today? Well, that depends. In my mind, there are only two reasons to ghostwrite a book:

  • Money. Plain and simple. That’s the only reason I did that second ghostwriting job. They paid me. And it wasn’t $5. (I honestly can’t remember what it was, but at that point in my career, it must have been at least $2,000.) Even that first ghostwriting gig, when I was a complete unproven unknown writer, paid me $500 per chapter — that’s $2,000 total.
  • Relationship building. This one is a little grayer. Suppose a publisher/editor contacted me about ghostwriting a book for a famous pilot. Suppose they were willing to pay (more than $5) but it wasn’t quite enough to get me to drop what I was doing and get to work. But suppose that this publisher/editor was building a book series by a bunch of pilots and the series was already popular. There was the definite possibility that ghostwriting this book could lead to more offers. And, if they liked my work enough, I’d be able to negotiate higher fees or other benefits — like an “as told to” byline on the cover — or even royalties on future work. If I thought this offer was a relationship builder that could lead to more or better opportunities in the future, I might go for it. It’s relationship building that I really got from those first four book chapters for Bernard. I co-authored my first book with him and that launched a solo writing career that spanned 85 books and hundreds of articles in just over 20 years.

At every writing opportunity, every writer should be asking one big question: what’s in it for me?

(Haven’t read my “Freebies” post yet? This is a perfect time to go do that.)

Why is this guy offering to write someone else’s book for $5? I can’t imagine — unless he just doesn’t have any ideas and wants someone to feed them to him?

Otherwise, why wouldn’t he just write his own damn book and self-publish it? Then at least his name would be on the cover and he’d own the copyright. He might even make more than $5.

Writers Write

I’ve been a writer since I was 13 years old and wrote stories and book chapters in spiral ring binders. Back then, I tried entering short story contests and failed miserably, not really knowing how to get started, and honestly, not being a very good writer. (I have those old notebooks to prove it; they make me cringe!) But I wrote anyway because I was a writer and the more I wrote — and read, don’t forget that! — the better I got.

(By the way, I write in this blog because I’m a writer. Real writers write. We can’t help it. I just don’t need to make a living as a writer anymore.)

Meanwhile, my family pounded the idea of having a stable career into my head. Writing was not a stable career — at least not in their minds. Being young and foolishly believing that they knew best, I made a wrong turn into a career in auditing and finance, losing 8 years that I could have spent building a writing career. By the time I became a freelance writer back in 1990, I had a home and financial responsibilities. I had to make a living as a writer. There was no going back.

Could I have made a living as a writer if I didn’t analyze every opportunity I found? Of course not. Instead, I’d be banging away at an office job, writing stories, likely never to be published, on evenings and weekends — as I did during my 8 year wrong turn.

The Take-Away

The takeaway is this: if you want to write, write. If you want to make a living as a writer, make sure you don’t sell yourself short. Take only the jobs that will move your career forward — or at least help pay the bills.