)O( Tea Witch’s Musings )O(

A member of the Sisters In Crime Guppy group was asked by a potential agent to decribe her writing career goals.  So we’ve all tried answering that question.  I think, well, should I give a BS answer that I might give to an agent or the real answer because my writing career goals have changed over time.  Oh, when I was in high school and college, I wanted to become a writer and earn my living writing fiction.  There was the Masters program where I thought it would be great to become a creative writing teacher at a college and write fiction when I wasn’t teaching.  It took only a couple of semesters to realize everyone in the graduate writing program shared that goal and there weren’t enough colleges to go around.  Things got a bit ugly during the “Teaching Creative Writing” class which was a combined English program and Education program class when the Education program students said they wanted to get jobs teaching creative writing at the college level, but didn’t want to bother with the actual act of writing.  Forget genre writers versus literary writers.  Suddenly there was a unified front insisting that non-writers should not teach writing — and take up those jobs we all wanted. 

But throughout all this, I had to earn a living, so I worked.  I picked up some webskills.  I got a couple of promotions.  Suddenly I was making more money in my corporate communication job than I was likely to make teaching creative writing at the local colleges.  No, this isn’t a lot of money.  Most of the local colleges pay somewhere in the $20,000 range if you can even get a full-time job. Tenure is hard to come by.  I make more, have benefits and have been at my job long enough to get about as much vacation as a college professor.  I make much more than the average paperback writer does.  So, I no longer needed a writing career to be my full-time job. 

But I still love to write.  That’s the key to writers.  We love to write.  We need to write.  I still want a writing career.  But my goals changed in the last few years.  They became  “I want to be published so I have a valid excuse to keep doing this.”  Not money, not fame (okay, won’t turn them down if they’re offered), but just to be able to say “oh, I write” and not have the other person give me one of those condescending looks that striving writers so often get.  When they say “oh, what have you written?”  I want to be able to give them a list of books.  I want my characters to live and breathe.  My writing — simply to be able to keep writing.