When people who’ve known me [...]]]>

I’m on a deadline and couldn’t think of anything to write about this month, so I dredged up an oldie but a goody from 2005 that is still as pertinent to me today as it was back then. I updated a few of the details but the sentiment is the same.

When people who’ve known me for a while find out that I’ve published some books and am pursuing a career as a writer, one question usually comes up before long: When are you quitting your day job?

This question brings assumptions with it, whether or not the person asking it realizes as much. First, there’s an assumption that if I’ve published books that are in bookstores and in libraries, continue to have good Amazon rankings, were reviewed in Publishers Weekly, are available as limited editions, were translated into other languages, etc. that I must be rolling in dough, so I’ll soon be upscaling my life. I think the idea that there’s huge wealth in publishing comes from an unwarranted extrapolation from the music industry or Hollywood, where a single modest success can set a person up for life.

The second assumption is that my day job is merely a support system for my writing. If that were true, if I was just putting in eight hours a day at a job I barely tolerated so I could write, I would be miserable. As it happens, I currently have two jobs. One I do during the daytime. I’ve been with the same company for 22 years. I love my “day job.” I’m good at what I do there, and it is fulfilling and rewarding. It’s not just something that pays the bills, buys printer paper and covers my family with health insurance. My second job, which I’ve been doing since 2000, is equally fulfilling and more flexible. It has to be, because I fit it in where I can, between day job, family life, chores, and many other things.

My normal response, when I really don’t want to get into a lengthy discussion of the finances of a writer (i.e. always) is this: “I know a lot of writers. I know a lot of writers with day jobs.” If I’m feeling particularly expansive, I say, “The number of writers able to support themselves comfortably solely by writing is fairly small.”

Here’s the reality. Suppose, just suppose, I wrote a killer novel, a publisher loved it and saw a decent market for it, and offered me a big advance. A huge advance. Hey, we’re making things up – let’s say the advance is a cool quarter million. $250,000 smakeroos. That, by the way, is astronomically higher than the average advance for a first novel. What would that mean for me?

Well, after my agent gets his 15% and Uncle Sam gets his share, I’d be lucky to come away with $150,000. And, of course, not all in one lump sum. Best case scenario, half now and half on publication. “Now,” of course, means that six to eight weeks after the publisher approves payment, a check will be sent to my agent. Sounds like a decent amount of money, but in the general timeframe of publishing I’d be unlikely to see both installments in one calendar year, so that really amounts to two years’ worth of income. I’d have to be hopelessly optimistic or foolish to give up a job where I have a fifteen-year history for something like that. Suppose I’m a one-hit wonder (or, worse, a one-flubber when the book doesn’t sell).

Even if I hit the big times and got a million bucks in advance, that really only represents (after commissions and taxes) a decade of good income. I’m 50 – I have about fifteen years ahead of me before I could even start to think about retiring from my day job. What happens when I’m 55 or 58 and blocked and there’s not much money coming in from the royalties any more, and…

Maybe I’m a bit of a pessimist or alarmist. I prefer to think of myself as a realist. I love to write. I like the income I make for my writing. In the best case scenario, I hit my stride, find my voice, find an audience and start producing commercially viable novels every year or two, and I reach the point where I could conceivably retire from the day job. Would I? Well, I’m realist enough to acknowledge that if I attained that level of success, I might have to give up the day job in order to meet a regular publishing deadline. My 2-hour session between 5 and 7 a.m. before I get ready for the day job just might not cut it. It’s the kind of dilemma I wouldn’t mind facing some day.

In the interim, however, no, I have no plans to give up my day job. There are real people where I work. People I can interact with. A social group, a friendly bunch. And I enjoy what I do. It doesn’t get in the way of my writing – I’ve found a way to make these two avocations co-exist. I would miss it if I had to give it up.

It’s not my general aspiration to write myself out of a day job. It’s my aspiration to write, to continue to get published, improve my craft and have a blast with everything life tosses my way.

What [...]]]>

I recently agreed to be interviewed by a college undergrad for one of her classes. Their assignment was to interview someone working in a career that interested them. Since that interview won’t see the light of day outside of the student’s class, I thought I would post it here in lieu of my usual blatherings.

What is your career and how long have you been working in this career?

I actually have two careers. For the past 22 years I’ve worked for a company that sells scientific instrumentation – that’s what I call my “day job.” However, since 1999 I have also been a writer. I’ve published dozens of essays and interviews, hundreds of book reviews, over sixty short stories and two books, along with a third that I edited. I’ve also written several novels, none of which have been published yet.

What is a typical day like in this career?

Because I have two jobs, I have to handle my schedule quite carefully. The day job is fixed: eight o’clock to five o’clock, Monday through Friday. Since I’m a morning person, I get up at five a.m. and go upstairs to my home office, where I do my writing. My writing window is 5 – 7 a.m. After that I exercise for 30 minutes (because I spend most of my day at a desk, this is very important!) and get ready for the day job. Most evenings I take off; however, if I’m on a deadline I might review or edit material. On the weekends I work at the writing job in the middle of the day, too, when possible.

On a typical morning, if I’m working on something new, I can write 1000-1500 words during that two-hour session. On the other hand, I can completely revise a short story once during that session. Other days I have to handle business matters, such as finding new markets to which to submit short stories, or doing research for essays or stories.

At the moment I’m working on my third non-fiction book.

What is your favorite part of this career?

Getting acceptance letters, seeing my work in print in a new book, seeing one of my books in a store, getting a positive review or a nice piece of fan mail. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, but the thrill of having an editor accept my work for publication hasn’t decreased. When a reader takes the time out of his or her busy schedule to write an e-mail saying that they liked something I wrote is also thrilling. I remember the first time I saw an anthology that contains one of my stories at the local grocery store, as well as in a bookstore in Newark airport.

What is your least favorite part of this career?

Waiting. The turnaround time between when I submit something and when I hear back about it can be anywhere from one day (rare) to three months (typical) to over a year. I always have anywhere from 10-20 works in submission at any given time, so it’s not like that’s the only thing I’m waiting on, but it’s still tough.

What surprised you the most when you started working in this field?

I can’t think of many surprises from when I started writing. Perhaps how quickly I managed to get my first acceptance letter—it took less than a year. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover the various different ways that a writer can find a community to become part of. When I began, online message boards and critique groups were becoming established and writers had a way of gravitating together—often not to do any real writing work but to share the experiences of being writers, with all its ups and downs. The full-time writers often have issues to deal with that aren’t part of my experience: how to get health insurance, how to get a delinquent publisher to pay, how to write enough to pay the bills. With my full time job, I don’t have to worry as much about those matters.

However, what surprises me most now is that I should have ended up being better known for my non-fiction writings than for my fiction. I didn’t set out to be an “expert” in any subjects, or to write non-fiction books. I always saw myself as a short story and novel writer, and while those still form a large chunk of what I do, my best successes have come from non-fiction. I wouldn’t have predicted that back in 2000.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get started in this field?

I have a lot of advice! On the 17^th of every month I write an essay for a group blog called Storytellers Unplugged wherein I offer advice based on my experiences over the past twelve years. One of my biggest issues is that young (novice) writers are often so eager to see their names in print that they fall prey to scams (there are a number of them out there) or take shortcuts that don’t serve them well. Currently, self-publishing is one of the biggest minefields. Anyone can slap together a book and put it out, either through a print-on-demand service or as an eBook. However, most of these books are terrible. They haven’t been properly edited, either on a word-by-word basis or as a whole. While writing is a solitary business for the most part, publishing isn’t. My best publishing experiences have been the ones where astute editors have offered feedback—suggestions for how to fix or improve my work—and this vital stage gets skipped in the rush to get works out there. As I mentioned above, I have several unpublished novels in the drawer. I could easily self-publish any or all of these . . . but I won’t. I want them to find an editor who’s willing to work with me to get them into shape first.

My biggest piece of advice would be: listen to advice! One of the most frustrating things is to see young writers making the same mistakes that other people have made. Over and over again. There seems to be a “yes, but it will be different for me” mentality that allows young writers to ignore advice. They give away their work or allow it to be published poorly, they argue that getting paid isn’t important—it’s about the art. Artistic aspirations aside, getting paid is part of the deal, and it’s often an important way to discriminate between a good publishing situation and a bad one. If someone is willing to pay you for what you write, they are probably professionals. If someone offers a pittance – or a promise of royalties down the road – chances are they don’t know what they’re doing, which means the work will get no promotion or distribution, which means no one will read it. Also, if they’re willing to pay the printer, the cover artist, the person laying out the book, the advertisers, etc. why shouldn’t they pay the most important contributor: the writers?

If you were a college student again, what would you do differently to prepare you for this career?

I would probably take more courses on classic literature. For my birthday several years ago, my wife signed me up for a class at the local community college that “forced” me to read some of the great classics that I’d missed. It was terrific. Knowledge of these works helps inform my writing. Many (most?) important themes have been covered countless times over the centuries and you can bolster and strengthen your work by acknowledging and alluding to those past works. It also makes you a better reader (and reading is an important facet of being a writer) by letting you recognize the allusions and references when you encounter them in someone else’s work.

What are the key personal characteristics for success in this career?

First of all, you have to have the patience and persistence to treat writing like a job. Write every day, even when you don’t feel like it. A novel is a large body of work, tens of thousands of words, perhaps even over a hundred thousand. That seems daunting. But if you write 1000 words every day, you can produce that amount in just a few months. That’s not guaranteeing it will be good, but getting a first draft done is the first step. In a way, writing is like exercising—the more you do it, the better you can get, especially if you have someone providing constructive feedback that you are willing to hear.

You have to have a thick enough skin to handle rejection, too, because it’s going to happen. Repeatedly. It’s just part of the business. Even though I’ve published 65 short stories, I still get more rejection letters than acceptances. On the other side of the coin, I’ve had short stories accepted by an editor that were rejected by a dozen others. Sometimes, a rejection is not a reflection of the quality of the work but rather on whether it appeals to an editor or whether it fits into the style and tone of the publication. They still sting a little, but you can’t let them get you down.

Being and acting professional goes a long way. Hit deadlines, be willing to consider critical feedback, be polite and respectful instead of defensive when responding to critiques. Publishing is a small world and editors talk to each other. If you develop a reputation as someone difficult to work with, word will spread. Don’t argue with editors over rejections—pick yourself up and move on. There may still be a place in literature for the occasional “enfant terrible,” but for the most part if you are abrasive, high maintenance or difficult, people won’t want to work with you and may not want to read your work. This applies to both your professional interactions and to public interactions on message boards and social media. If you are a reliable writer who is easy to work with, you might end up being invited to participate in projects that aren’t open to the public.

What skills do I need to develop to prepare me for this field that I may not be taught in the college classroom?

Obviously, you should have decent grammar and spelling skills. However, you should also make a study of the art of telling a story if you plan to write fiction. Everyone shouldn’t re-invent the wheel. Understanding basic concepts like Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and the three-act structure of most movies will go a long way toward helping you grasp what goes into a story. There’s a reason why these structures have been adopted as standards. You don’t have to adhere to them strictly, but you should understand them.

On the more practical side, few college courses teach you the mundane elements of preparing a manuscript or how to research markets for submission. The former is not rocket science, but unless you realize that it’s something that you need to know, you can go on making the same mistake over and over again. If you send in a manuscript that is single-spaced in a wacky font, or one that is handwritten in crayon (it does happen!) you won’t necessarily be automatically rejected—but you increase the odds against you. Some markets receive so many submissions that they are just looking for an excuse to reject someone, and a poorly formatted manuscript might be all it takes.

Also, if you submit your romance novel to a market that is only interested in short crime fiction, you aren’t doing anyone any favors. Learning how to research markets, reading and understanding their guidelines, and playing by their rules is one of the most important skills a writer will develop. It seems like common sense, but the funny thing is that a lot of people don’t seem to have common sense!

I recommend Stephen King’s book On Writing to aspiring authors. Even people who aren’t fans of his novels have found a lot of good advice in this book. Part of it is autobiographical, what he calls his C.V. The life skills that translated into his writing.

I have a day job [...]]]>

Since I just finished doing my taxes, and I’ve seen more than the usual number of questions from writers who are wondering about how to handle writing income and what can be legitimately deducted, I thought I would dredge up and revamp my essay on the subject from five years ago.

I have a day job that provides me with a W-2 form. It’s neat and tidy. Fill out the forms, enter the correct values, brush my hands together and it’s all done. Writing is my second job, one where I am self-employed. My agent provides me with a form 1099-MISC for royalties from mainstream publications. However, the rest of my income comes in dribs and drabs in the form of checks and PayPal transfers. None of these employers provide tax forms at the end of the year. It’s up to me to keep track of this income and report it on a Schedule C.

Because I am self-employed for this part of my income, my tax burden is higher than for my main income. That’s because a traditional employer pays benefits to the government on my behalf (social security, etc.) whereas when I am my own boss, I have to pony up the full allocation. Also, no taxes are deducted from any of this income. If I don’t pay attention, I may end up owing the government a lot of money at the end of the year . . . and paying a fine to boot if I pass their critical threshold. Rather than submitting quarterly installments of my estimated taxes—which is one way to avoid the year-end clobber—I increase my payroll deductions from my day job to try to keep up with my writing income tax burden.

Schedule C is not a complicated form, but you make your life a lot easier if you’ve been doing the organizational work throughout the year instead of waiting until now to scrounge around for all the receipts and records that represent your income and outflow for the past year. Though it’s too late to put this into practice for the 2010 tax year, I highly recommend using some sort of accounting spreadsheet (Excel or a program like Microsoft Money) to record each expense and income as you receive it rather than waiting until the end of the year to put them all together. Maybe I’m a little obsessive about it, but it makes life so much easier come tax time.

Unlike the main part of the 1040 tax form, where only a  percentage of certain expenses reduces gross income, everything I spend that is related to my writing business is deducted straight off any writing income. Spend 44 cents for a postage stamp to mail a query letter, and that diminishes my writing income by 44 cents. (You may feel a little foolish recording an entry for a 44-cent stamp at first, but believe me, when the following spring comes around and you’re looking for whatever you can find to reduce your writing income for tax purposes you’ll be glad you did.) Go to World Horror and many of the expenses involved with that trip can be deducted. Airfare, hotel, ground transportation, registration fees, etc.

Microsoft Money lets me (pretty much forces me to) assign a category to each expense. Over the years, I’ve whittled the various categories down to a handful that simplify my job come tax time. All I have to do is run a report and generate a single page that has all the information I need to enter on the Schedule C part of my tax software. For expenses, everything boils down to one of the following: Conference expenses, professional dues, research materials, marketing, postage, office supplies and bank fees. In TurboTax, I record any 1099-misc forms I receive, the sum total of all other writing income, and the numbers associated with each of these expense categories and I’m done with that part of the taxes. Ten minutes, tops.

The receipts themselves go into a file folder. I make a note on the back of each one to indicate what the expense was for (e.g. Submission to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine). Sometimes a receipt will contain personal expenses as well as business ones, so I circle any items that are tax deductible. If I pick up a pack of pens for signings while I’m at the grocery store, the whole meat and potatoes receipt goes into the file with that one entry circled. At tax time I’ll go through my Money database and check off all the receipts in the file just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I’m funny like that.

Some people use one credit card exclusively for their business expenses. That means at year-end all transactions are on a single set of statements instead of interleaved with personal finances. Each February or March I decide that sounds like a good idea, but by then it’s too late to start doing that for the current year. Next year, I say, but then I forget . . . until next February or March. Income is easier, so long as I keep records. No one is likely to ask me to prove a declared income item. I get a check, enter it in Money, cash it, and the paper trail ends there.

If you are in the habit of purchasing a lot of your books for resale at conventions, then you have to keep track of that income and outflow, too. I prefer turning that responsibility over to vendors at cons. That way I can also avoid worrying about collecting sales tax. I was forced to acquire a sales tax ID number to sell books at a local event a few years ago, which meant that I also had to file a state sales tax return.

Understand that I am not an accountant or a tax specialist. (I say that in case you do something based on what you read here and you get audited and sent to jail.) Once you decide you’re a professional writer, there are some fundamental decisions you have to make. One is whether or not to declare part of your house as a business office. If your income is great and you really need the deduction, it might be worthwhile, but I haven’t gone that route. It’s too complicated for my taste. You declare the percentage of your house that is devoted to your office—for me that’s my desk: about ten square feet (twenty if you count the piles of papers and books on the floor around it). Much of what I do in that space is business related, but I also do personal things there, too. The implications of declaring a business office rear their ugly head if you sell your house. It looks so messy that I haven’t gone to the trouble to learn all that’s involved. Just be forewarned that if you go down that road you should have a clear understanding of what it might entail.

Toner, paper, postage stamps, photocopying fees, monthly internet service, conference expenses, those are all fairly straightforward. An area where things get messier is if you buy computers, printers and scanners, digital cameras and other durable items that you will continue to use for several years. Here you get into the realm of amortization and depreciation—you put these items into service the year you purchase them and either declare the expense all at once or amortize it over a number of years. Then you start depreciating their value until they are worthless according to the taxation authority. Since I’m not an accountant (see above), and since I use most of these items personally as well as for business, I don’t declare them as business expenses to avoid that whole depreciation/amortization complication. I could probably have saved myself a few bucks over the years by doing so, but I figure I saved myself enough aggravation to offset the fiscal hit.

Not much has changed in my process during the past five years since I wrote the first version of this essay. The price of postage stamp went up from 0.39 to 0.44, I observe, though. Here’s hoping that the season isn’t an overly taxing one for you. This is one time when it is definitely much nicer to receive than to give.

I’m in one [...]]]>

Every now and then, Jeopardy has a category called “Potpourri” that is filled with questions (or answers) that don’t fit into any other category. I think this is going to be that kind of entry. I don’t know what to call it and I don’t really know what it’s going to be about.

I’m in one of those in-between periods. I finished a couple of short stories, one in early December that was accepted after revisions for a forthcoming anthology. The other I finished a week or so ago and have already collected a rejection slip for it and found a new market to inflict it upon. My to-do list contains the guidelines for three anthologies that I would like to write stories for, with deadlines in March, May and July. However, I only have glimmers of ideas for two of them and nothing at all yet for the third, which is also the most challenging. I’m nowhere near ready to start writing any of the stories.

The most recent story I wrote was also challenging. It was supposed to be humorous, but I don’t think I know how to write something deliberately funny. My recent story “The Bank Job,” published in Thin Ice, had funny moments and it was light in tone, but I wouldn’t say it was a knee-slapper. Jaunty, perhaps. So this recent story, the one that was supposed to be funny, ended up being more satirical than humorous. Almost a parody. I wasn’t surprised when it was returned. The idea took a long time to develop and I made one serious false start at it that amounted to three or four pages, all of which I discarded. Then I came up with a different approach to the story, with a different viewpoint, and it all came together like magic. In fact, I wrote most of the story in my head after I woke up one Saturday morning and what ended up on the page was very much as I had mentally inscribed it. The editor who rejected it had some complimentary things to say about it, so I have hopes that it will sell somewhere else, somewhere that won’t expect it to be funny.

What do you do when you want to write a story for a market but don’t yet have a story idea? I have a number of journals that I use to handwrite stories when I’m traveling. At the back of these, I often have pages of story idea notes, things that occurred to me out of the blue that I capture for possible future use. Every now and then one or two of these, coupled with the anthology theme, come together to spark a story. I take a modicum of satisfaction in crossing these ideas off the list when they’re used. “See?” I tell myself. “Good thing I wrote that down. I knew it would come in handy some day.” And yet the list of ideas grows faster than the list of stories I write. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Cheaper—they’re as prevalent as  molecules of oxygen in the air. However, it takes some mysterious form of chemistry—or perhaps it’s alchemy—to fuse ideas with inspiration with characters to come up with a story. Right now I’m waiting for that spark to ignite. I know it will happen, but I can’t force it to happen, alas. Would that I could.

I’m also champing at the bit to tackle a novel again, but I’ve been stumped there, too, and I finally figured out why. I have a complete manuscript for a novel that needs renovation, but I subsequently wrote a new first chapter that introduces different elements of the story. That chapter was well received by my agent and also by my critique group. I believed that I would then revise the novel with that chapter defining the style and adding a new subplot, but I was never able to get back on track with it. I was wrestling the story in a direction it refused to go, and I should have figured out sooner that I was fighting inspiration. Then, while I was cogitating over one of the anthology guidelines, the next incident after the new first chapter came to me, and then another one after that and I realized I was writing a completely different book. So, I think I will go with it and, instead of revising the existing manuscript, I will write the new book that wants to be written. I can go back to the older manuscript later if the new book works out. I’ll have a better idea of the characters, because there is quite a bit in them that needed exploration that I didn’t do in the original manuscript. One of my goals for 2011 is to write that book.

However, you just never know what else might come along to alter those plans. I’m scheduled to talk to my agent on Wednesday about another project that might take on a life of its own and elbow everything else out of the way.

One thing’s certain: I’ll be writing lots of things this year. The jury’s still out on which category I’ll be selecting first, Alex.