What a powerful combination of weeks to end up being paired together by me, and my super busy life: Honesty and Making a Living. So, let me just dive into this one. Honesty was prompted by a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in which she talks to fiction and it’s truthfulness. In fact, she argues that authors are more truthful when they write fiction than they are when they write non-fiction, i.e. memoirs. Of course this struck a chord with me. In fact, my first real attempt at writing my first book was in the fiction medium. The reason, was that I was currently with my partner, and required the veil of fiction to properly get some words on the page that I knew he would feel bad about.
Looking back at that, I cannot help but wonder what that story would have looked like had I continued. Ultimately I am glad I didn’t finish that work, but when it comes to part II of this challenge and Making a Living, well, here I am, not. I learned a fun fact about the Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, that I had never read before, and that was her novel was written for money. While this certainly doesn’t change my outlook on writing, and what is overall permissible to write in order to get notoriety, it did give me a moments pause.
My partner always jokes that I should write a harlequin romance novel, to fund the writing of my actual passions. And whenever I hear this, I laugh and laugh and laugh. But, am I really laughing? The hard truth is my subject matter is not really “monetizable”. For more on that, please read A Free Pass: Writing About Sex as a Woman, in which I explain more on this. But the thing is, the hard thing to come to terms with is, if I had made my book a fiction, instead of a memoir, it might very well have been more easily swallowed. The thing is, we are not yet in a sex positive society, and thus we are more comfortable knowing what really goes on in a relationship under the guise of make-believe.
But you see, I want that to change. I want to push the envelope and be the person who doesn’t make you uncomfortable reading about these things. And so, I suppose, until my book gets published, I will keep not making a living at writing the words that my passion aligns with. And I will continue to be grateful that I have a day job, that pays me for words, at least on a part time basis, even though the words are branded and for them. I am lucky in that. But I yearn to be even luckier, and to one day make a living to do write and talk about the things that I think we need more of in our society, sex positivity (a word still not in the dictionary!).
Thank you all for sharing my ramblings, and an even bigger shoutout to my Patreon subscribers!
