Compensation Part 4

Lie to people. Lie to your family. Lie to your friends. Let everyone in the community think you're rich, and possibly famous. Let everyone believe that the books you penned are best sellers, and if not here, or New York, then at least elsewhere like Tanzania, Tasmania or Transylvania. It is no business of anyone to know how much or how little you get compensated for the writing that you do. It does not matter that you earned nothing more than prestige rather than any money when some small literary magazine picked up and published your short story.

It doesn't matter, not really, but I have learned all sorts of assumptions people make when they find out you're a writer. The first is that you must be really misanthropic. You must be wicked smart. You are more than likely an atheist. And the one that I love is that you must be shy. When the same people discover that you have a book, or many books, published, they have other assumptions. First, you must be more than wicked smart. You're probably famous. More than likely you have money.

It's absurd. I recently met a flour miller. I was floored. I was so excited to hear about what he did with his day, how he got into that line of work and what sort of education he had to get in order to become a miller. Needless to say, I made no assumptions about him, his personality, his bank account or the internal circumstances that led him on the path of the flour miller. Why would I? I just never understood why being a writer holds such mystic with so many people. In a way, it might be because we are subject to books and short stories and movies that have a frustrated writer as a protagonist, and therefore we're led to believe that there is something mystical about writers.

Compensation Part 3

The time never comes back. I've had the occasional time waste. I feel very fortunate that I don't fall victim to the more conventional time sucks. I don't have a television, and I never have. I do not play video games, have never been into sports. I have always felt that the time that I have has always been my own. I have never once in my life complained about not having enough time. Part of it is that I have never been one to overextend myself. The other part of it is that I know that my time is very, very, very limited. If I live a long life, and I feel like that's probable, I'm already past the halfway point. I find a little solace in that. However, my time is not preordained, and I could be at the very end of my life as I write these words, and I would never know it.

When it comes to compensation, we don't often consider time in the equation. We should. When it comes to the working world, there are allowances for time. Flex days off, extra money, etc. But what about those hours that we get to control? What about all those hours that so many of us while away in the idlest of ways? I think about these hours a great deal, and I hope to use them wisely. It's sad that I don't feel like I do as much as I could. I still get a great deal done, and like I said, I have never been one to complain of a lack of time.

Compensation Part 2

Getting paid is good. It's nice to see a whole bunch of zeros behind, well, behind any number. However, that isn't the case when you've decided to live the artist's life. It has never ceased to amaze me how any number of people, friends and family members included, have never had any trouble paying me for a drink and giving me a tip all those years I stood behind a bar. It's like they'll pay the eight bucks and a two buck tip without even blinking. Yet, come to buying one of my books? Forget about it. It's the exact same price, ten bucks, and of the ten bucks I'll get two. Sure, getting paid is a wonderful thing, wonderful indeed, but it just isn't a realistic expectation.

In fact, I feel like writing, and anymore especially, is a real hustle. I've known those creative writers who make a great deal of money, a whole lot of sales, but there is a time limit to it. I had an associate many years ago who wrote an entire series of military/zombie novels. He told me he'd had a ten thousand dollar month. Pretty impressive, and wow, I was proud of him if not a little envious. He also told me that the life expectancy of a novel in today's rapid fire publication scheme is less than ninety days. This means, of course, that a writer can work for weeks, months or years on a novel and only get the opportunity to sell that book over a period of ninety days.

Compensation

It's early morning. The small hours. It's darkness outside, the dark of night. This is the time of day when the late night people and the early morning people might overlap, but not due to personalities. It's the small hours. And the dawn is far off. And on this dawn, the one that's hours away, will be denied to you. This particular dawn will be a new day for everyone else but you. You'll be dead. This is the end of the road, the end of the line, the end of your life. This is not a threat, this is just a supposition. In this hypothetical death, you are very very very old. You have lived many years, many days and many nights and this night is the last. And also, in this picture, this late night picture, you are in a peaceful state, there has not been terminal sickness, no pain, no real indication that this is the end. But you know it is.

A thought: you now congratulate yourself on all the hours you got to work in your life. You went to work early, and you wore that badge of honor that you worked more hours than everyone else in your office. You moved more units and made more sales that the other guys. You were a loyal company man. And when you retired, forced to retire to make way for the next generation, you got another job, a retirement job, something to do, you see, to take up the hours. But this job was lucrative too, and the money never hurt. There were hours for you, television in the late evenings mostly after your family had gone to bed. The house is mostly quiet now. The children have left home, some many years ago now, they don't call too often, and they no longer come around for visits as they have families of their own. You miss your spouse, she passed a few years back. You miss your spouse as much as you can, the two of you, despite the years, hardly knew one another.