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Q5. Do you want to be a professional author?

Sub-Questions:

Will you ever publish your books?

Why didn't you go for a writing degree, given that you seem to be moving toward writing professionally?

I'll start with my answer to the main question: yes and no.

This is a bit of a tricky one to answer. On one hand, writing never used to be a part of my long-term career plans. I've long considered it a serious hobby, and whenever I thought about monetization, it was always a) far in the future, and b) the next challenge or "level up," just to see if I could do it. I never pictured it paying the bills. And I never really wanted to be a full-time author. For a few reasons, I still don't. Ish. But also do? It's complicated.

On the other hand, circumstances have conspired against me within the last year, and I've somehow ended up as a full-time author anyway.

Because of that, I have to start with the "yes" side of things. I love (love) writing. I've also held more than a couple jobs that... let's just say, didn't motivate me to get up in the morning. Thus begins the dream: being able to sit down at my desk every morning and write instead, and somehow have that pay the bills. Sounds magical! And I could totally do it. I've got the resources for querying, the speed for self-publishing, the love of stats and spreadsheets, the graphic-design skills for self-promotion. It is, theoretically, a possibility.

Unfortunately, writing professionally is a lot more than just sitting at your desk every day and writing.

I'll start with traditional publishing, or trad pub. Querying literary agents is the first step of that process, and it is a gruelling process of the ultimate kind. The kind that puts your mental health, sanity, and perception of your writing into a meat grinder and cranks it up to max. If you get an agent (huzzah!) that's no guarantee that your book will get published or earn you money, either. Trad pub is a business, and it's a pretty skeevy one sometimes. I won't get into the details because I'm not here to write an essay, but also because that's not the only issue it carries for me anyway.

I have two other major issues with publishing my books this way. The first is that trad pub has a very narrow idea of what it wants to publish, and because I write for fun and for me, I don't feel like bending to its demands. Especially when they intersect with my own identity. There's a lot of nasty stuff going on with gatekeeping of marginalized authors and forced "outing" of queer ones, and I don't want to subject myself to it for obvious reasons.

The other biggest issue is that I sit at a crossroads of identity and representation that has led me to self-select out of trad pub altogether with most of my books. I'm white. Many of my characters are not. I love writing not-my-identities for a multitude of reasons that will be answered in a later Q&A, but trad pub is a heavily gatekept institution. Taking many of my books there would mean taking up space, and while there are some that would not, those still have characters who share my own identity. Which brings us back to the other point above.

Self-publishing is where I'd land, then, and it has its own challenges. For one, it's basically three full-time jobs rolled into one. You're a writer, but also a marketer and a small-business owner, and that shit is hard. You need a huge backlog of books to get started. You need to keep up with the market, get the right covers, find editors and pay for all your own editing services, do small-business taxes, run your own promotion campaigns, buy ads, reach out to opportunities, and then write more books. At a pace of several per year. All at the same time.

Which I could still do. I think it'd be fun, honestly. But there's one last problem: neither form of publishing makes for a lucrative career. In fact, for 999 authors out of 1000, it's not even enough to put food on the table. Very few professional authors outside the JKRs and GRRMs of the world can survive off their writing alone, which means most hold part-time or even full-time jobs on top of their writing jobs, and that just isn't the kind of stress I want in my life.

So that's a lot of why I don't want my living income to rest on my writing. But there are other reasons, too.

One is that I tend to lose the joy of artistic endeavors when I'm relying on them for income, unless that income is magically guaranteed and I can simply write what I want and still receive it. Both forms of publishing could put me into this space, and writing is too valuable a thing to me for me to risk that kind of loss. It's also not my only passion.

This came up briefly in Q1 of my Q&A series here, but I have two special interests in life. Writing is one of them, but it's actually the younger of the two. The other is on the scientific and engineering side, which I've been obsessed with (in a good way) since I was two years old. I've known since childhood that I wanted to be in STEM when I grew up. I've been in STEM-focused programs since the start of high school. My degree-selection process for university was a matter of scrolling through lists of programs until I found The One that matched my interests, and then applying to it. It was in science and engineering.

My writing nerdiness comes from a much deeper reservoir of other nerdiness that leaks into everything else I do. But writing alone does not fulfill all the things I want to do in life. It's not the only way I want to contribute to the world, and while it makes good use of most of my brain, there are other parts it doesn't manage to touch on. Those parts also happen to set me up for a stable, rewarding, impactful, and well-paying career that would still leave time for writing. So if most full-time writers still need a job on the side anyway, why can't I just take it the other way around?

The truth is, I probably will still self-publish eventually. Probably not all of my books, and probably not soon. And who knows: if that goes exceptionally well and the other half of my life does not, maybe I will end up as a full-time author again someday. But right now, that's not the plan. I'm enjoying my stint of full-time authordom because it's getting me through a crunch period between school and employment, giving me resources to support other people in my life, and is currently better than the alternatives. It's also really hecking fun. I'd be kidding if I said I wasn't enjoying myself, or enjoying the look on real-life people's faces when I tell them I write books for a job.

And maybe that's the ideal, in the long run. Keeping both on the table, so that at any give time I might be a serious hobbyist writer + full-time in STEM, a part-time pro writer + part-time in STEM, or a full-time writer temporarily if I need to bridge another employment gap. It's a yes-and-no answer in the most literal sense, and I'm pretty content with that. 

Going to broaden this beyond just writing for the questions!

If you're any kind of artist (author included), what is your ideal level of professional involvement in that art form? Ex. Full-time, part-time, paying hobby, or hobby alone!

If you want (or have) a split career, what is your dream for the second portion?

Is there anything another job/career gives you that your art form does not?