cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Drudgery of Being a Writer I got a pretty fair amount of work done today on those chapter revisions. About 2,000 words of new material, which is far from my best rate of output, but I'm just now getting back into the swing of a writing routine. That was mostly in the space of about 3 hours. While I was home alone I went for a walk in the rain out in the woods and fields on the massive estate behind my house. I saw 3 or 4 bucks, lots of bear sign and the remains of a large doe that was killed by probably coyotes or a wildcat of some sort not long ago. It was far from any road, I could find no sign of a bullet, and there were no knife marks where I would expect them on the bone. Just honest, natural predation. The part of the hide that had been on the lower neck was pretty well shredded open, which leads me to suspect a big cat. Either a bobcat or a mountain lion. The money situation is about to get bad. Mortgage due, health insurance premium, etc, etc. The weather is probably going to turn cold as well and we don't have any heating oil. I'm not going to get the other half of this book advance for at least another 5 or 6 weeks, since I still have revisions to finish and they might come back with more. From the time that they declare the manuscript ready for print, they get to wait 30 days to mail the check. That is some seriously bad news. My editor sort of dragged her feet and should have started reviewing my manuscript a month ago. Now I don't know for sure how we're going to get through the next few months. I feel weirdly guilty about the idea of clearing out the $7k or so remaining in my SEP IRA. And of course I'd have a penalty to pay on that, so its more like $5k after taxes and so forth. My stockbroker would/will be so disappointed in me. And once I do that, that's it. I'll have nothing left. No savings whatsoever to cash out in case of emergency. Nothing. Just a couple of 12 year old used cars worth next to nothing, and a mortgage that I'm upside down on. I think I can make over $1,000 off of this October class, but of course I won't actually have most of the money until 3 weeks into the month. Well after most of the bills are due. I don't know what to do. I can't take any clients out on guided hunts until the deer season starts, which isn't until November. This is a rough spot I'm in. I also need to pay for this first of 2 trips to NYC in a couple of weeks. And here it is. The awful financial drudgery of being a professional writer. I have to say that it still beats the drudgery of my day job. Its not like that had been really paying the bills for the last few years anyhow. We only scraped by this past year with income from my teaching. At least now I get to sleep late. 8:43 p.m. - 2010-09-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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