The starving artist

People who are single can easily be starving artists. Before we were dating, my husband and his friend came over to my house to pick me up. While I was in the bathroom (because I was taught you always go to the bathroom before you leave), they both (who apparently had never been taught the manners of visiting someone's house) looked through my freezer. At which point my husband joked, upon my exit from the commode, that they could not give the $1 Kroger's pizzas away to employees for free when he worked there.

However, I was single. It is very easy to be single and live off power bars and $1 pizzas topped with frozen spinach. Not so much once you get married to the gourmet that I did (I say this in jest, if you give him 1/2 pound of grilled beef, some potatoes and canned corn, he is happy). Now that I have children, one of whom shuns peanut butter and bemoans the fact he is not deathly allergic to it so he would no longer need to smell it in the air or on our breath, and others who complain because I forget to tell them in the drive through that this sandwich gets no lettuce, this one no pickles, and this one no tartar sauce, now I have found living on the shoestring required of an artist (or in this case author) is not acceptable.

Thus, I have also decided that selling my own work may cost me money in the beginning - for pictures in the case of all the children's books I have written over the years, for editing in the case of the book I co-wrote with my husband, and for help getting past writers block in the case of most of my other works - but it will in fact bring in more money that is steadier if I can build a platform.

I have also decided that in order to keep the delicate balance of money coming in now - i.e. freelancing money - with money that will sustain me in the future - i.e. money I will make as a small time author once I have self-published - I will begin to limit my posts to once or twice a week. Although I feel I was faithful to the every other day posting that I initially set up for quite a while, it has been very difficult to sustain that. This has created two to three week gaps sometimes, that is not fair for people who are actually interested in finding out what it is like to be a freelance author or any sort of writer at all.