You wake up at 5:35 am and it still doesn’t feel like there is enough time in the day to get it all done. The writing is not even the hardest part. The grading gets that honor. Real responsive grading takes time and it takes energy–or maybe its that you are so brain drained and untrained to the constant grind that everything takes longer and wears you down more. It feels as though you are an artisan cobbler in a world of automated factories and you don’t think you’ll ever keep up; John Henry in the word mines.
Mixing and stacking metaphors is just a side effect of the mental strain.
Is this training? Is it how it is going to be for you? Did you get deep into the work too late? We haven’t even begun to talk about the prices they pay you. Industries pay anywhere between 3 and 12 cents a word. The swing is less about who you are than it is about who they are. Regardless, none of it resembles a living wage. 10,000 good words is going to take a few weeks when you measure in research and planning and drafting. Maybe forty or more real hours. All of that effort for $300 dollars. That is half of minimum wage in some states. If it were closer to the 12 cents you dream about but have never seen, you are still looking at $1200 dollars, or 30 bucks an hour. Now we are talking. Now we are mining.
So you decide to keep mining and keep working the jobs until that .045 goes up to .08 and onward. You’re getting faster and better, but you have to sacrifice quality and lifestyle along the way. In the end the dream is another grind of a job you didn’t forsee. The life is a fraction of the fun you did forsee. None of it adds up, so you try to figure out a better way to better pay. You think the Novel grind may go better, and it does, but the money appears further and further apart in burst payments tied to the beginning and end of a project that is only partly in your control. Life isn’t going as it should.
So you supplement. You teach. You love it. You dig in and have fun and make friends and… then there is less time for writing.
Balance is a hard thing to achieve in this short human lifespan. You need to figure out that it isn’t a static thing. Balance changes at every phase and sometimes every day. You measure your wants against your needs and you find what works and what you are willing to accept. Nothing is perfect–not for long at least.
But, in the end, you are still writing. You are feeling the thrill of the keys yielding beneath your fingers creating what did not exist a moment ago. You’re still hoping one of the stories hits big and you can step back and explore these worlds at your leisure, because the big money is out there somewhere. It is usually found in crossover fiction with TV and movie rights; international adaptations; world premieres. You don’t know if you’re telling those stories, but you know that you’re still telling stories.
That’s what counts.