Learning to be a ‘Real’ Writer: Part 1
Yeah, I know, right? You’all thought I was already a writer. Well, so did I, but I was a writer who had to have a day job, who wasn’t allowed to devote herself to being a writer full-time and so I never felt quite real. See, and that’s wrong. Because I was a writer. I wrote with the idea of making a living from it, but I came to realise that I also wrote with the knowledge that I would never be allowed to go full time, that making a living from it was a long way away, even unlikely, and then that wasn’t true any more. In the last six months, I’ve had to come to grips with some fairly major changes, both to things I thought I knew, and to personal circumstances, and that hasn’t been easy. For one thing, I lost my job. Actually, I was forced to choose between accepting having working conditions withheld and keeping my job, or completing the degree I had started with the permission and encouragement of my boss. “We not only support this kind of thing,” he’d said, “but we encourage ...