Here's to Real Writers!

One of my goals with this site is to make sure that I produce something each week. I would prefer that it be something good. However, I'm not trying to get anywhere with my writing.

I already got where I wanted to go with my writing. My Master's Thesis and a handful of minor publications got me into a career teaching college English, and afterward a modest level of published articles and poems helped me to get tenure and two promotions. Forty years have passed since I first eyeballed a career in university teaching. Now I am a semi-retired old goat tapping away for kicks.

I once aspired to write a novel, and I even worked up about fifty pages of a novel thirty-five years ago. However, as an avid reader of good novels at the time, I decided that my idea about following some young idiot and his eccentric colleagues through the ups and downs of their lives inside and outside the university wouldn't add much to the work that had already been done by writers with far more talent. So I stopped writing my novel.

Another contributing factor to the stifled novel is that I am lazy!

Reporters on daily newspapers have always been my idols when I think of productive writers. They have to produce damn near every day, and they can't loaf or take days off because they must meet deadlines. Lather, rinse, repeat.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023) the median wage for a writer was 35 dollars per hour and the median annual salary was 73,000 dollars. The bottom ten percent made about 20 dollars per hour.

Imagine the number of people sucking wind just trying to get to that 20 dollars per hour!

And now I am paying Wix a couple hundred dollars a year so that I can publish my work without getting paid for it. I guess I am a member of the inked stained wretches of the world after all!

Clover sits with Mary who is working a side gig as a writer!