If you were up in the wee hours of a St. Louis night, last night, you would have noticed me publish and then pull a couple of posts, which I then re-published this morning. Last night was another difficult, sleepless night for me, and sometimes I write things I’m not sure I want to publish: the first because it does reflect on friends of mine (and concerns that I’m breaking a confidence); the second because sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, I am a moral coward.
However, I’ve been assured that no confidences have been broken in regards to the first, and as for the second, in the morning I am always a tigress, hear me roar. I may be inspired by the night, but I’m emboldened by the morning.
My sleepless nights are due in some part to attempting to live life as a writer, as Halley Suitt puts it. Though I want to make further comment on her geographical ruminations in a later post, for now I can agree with Ms. Suitt when she writes, It’s not easy to make a living being a writer. Even being known, especially being known primarily in weblogging circles, is no guarantee of success when it comes to selling books or articles.
(Especially not when you write a book on something like RDF and most of your readers aren’t technical, aren’t interested in RDF, or both, as sales seem to indicate. I should either write about sex, dieting, or having sex while you are dieting.)
Unless you’re JK Rowley or Stephen King, most fulltime writers live in a permanent state of hunger; spending an amazing amount of time thinking of new article and book ideas, looking for new publication sources, and searching for other sources of income in between those times when actually working on one’s current book (three chapters of which will earn the next installment in the advance and thus one can pay for one’s car, not to mention that the kitty cat needs to have her teeth cleaned).
