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My day so far:

My mother has pneumonia. She's very perky with it and totally peeved she has to cancel everything this weekend. She's already done more things in this morning than I do in two full days, so she is quite ill without being debilitated, which is a mystery. A good mystery, I admit, because pneumonia is not something one wishes on anyone, especially not one's mother.

My fridge is coming at 5 pm. If I say this enough it will be true.

It's over 33 degrees and 11 am. This is OK, because I'm about to have lots of coffee or tea. I'll make up my mind when I get there. I have milk and cherries and other fruit. I also have two slices of bread as a special treat for lunch. I might mope about lack of refirgeration, but my friends have been very good to me and I suspect most of the miseries are caused by the weather.

I just found a 1961 penny. Is is good luck, or just that I forgot to put it away when I used it in class one day?

I really, really, really don't want to work today, but I really, really, really have no choice. If I get my act together, I might do that blogpost on what the hidden costs of writing can be a bit later, when I've done other stuff.

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Today just gets stranger and stranger. A fire in Fyshwick means the refrigerator people have been told to get out, promptly. They just rang me to say they have loaded my fridge onto their ute and will be right over. It's an ill wind... this particular ill wind hit at 38.9 degrees C and caused CanTurf* to catch on fire.



*or its environs

Fiction and money

This post is about overheads, and it isn't. I read all the emails and all the comments on my two posts about overheads for writers and realised that we weren't all thinking about the same subject. I thought it might be a good idea to spell out (for myself, as much as for anyone else) how everything fitted together.

There are many people who know far more than I do about the money side of novel writing. If any of you have additions or emendations or better explanations, I'd appreciate your comments. Please also feel free to lie through your teeth and say nice things about my two posts.

Two posts? Yes. You don't want to know how long my first draft was. After I got rid of most of the jokes, it was still too long. Even after I deleted digressions, it made enough for two blogposts.

I want to number things, or something, but instead, I'm going to start by belabouring the obvious: the money paid to a writer because of a book contract isn't profit. It's a writer's income. Fortunately, Sean Williams (one of the kind souls who emailed me thoughts and ideas) has given me the perfect graphic to explain this. In Sean's piechart, you want the section labelled 'for me'. You can also see where the rest of the income from his books goes. Of that, the one we're mostly interested in here is 'expenses.'

The income described in Sean's piechart is proportionate. It doesn't cover a regular sum of money or predictable earnings. Sean's breakdown is his income over time. It's very clear where his income goes in a year and what proportion he gets to take home to pay for groceries.

Take a look at another of his pictures. Make sure you're sitting down. This is a graph of the changes in amount of that income over time.

Don't look at the wonderfully high peaks or the very depressing troughs. Think of it as a day-to-day way of earning a living. Consider what it's like planning a life where you have absolutely no idea if you're going to get $50,000 or $5 in your next pay. Knowing that, for most writers, pay is at the low end of the scale.

That was the perspective I needed to give before anything else would make sense. Now we can start talking about other stuff. Stuff that eats into that income, whether it's rolling up to a gorgeous high, or has just plummeted into non-existence. Stuff that has to be allowed for from that strangely rollercoastering income.

littenz pointed out that there are terminology issues in considering that other stuff. Specifically, what many writers consider as overheads, have other meanings to other people (which might be what tripped me up with that bookseller). Rather than argue about terms, what I thought I would do was look at the various things writers encounter and have to allow for in order to keep working professionally. Some of these might be overheads, some expenses, some hard to categorise. It's not a complete list. I created it from my own experience and from those emails and comments I've received over the last week.

There's one definition that's unavoidable, however. When I say 'writer,' for the purposes of this blogpost, I mean a fiction writer who makes their living (or significant part of their living) from their writing. There are many writers who write perfectly beautifully, but who write as a hobby. The way one deals with costs, expenses, overheads, life choices when the activity is a hobby is quite different to the way the way one deals with exactly the same thing when it's income.

Teaching is my main source of income right now and writing my secondary, but the teaching is as sporadic as the income from writing, so most of my calculations are similar to those made by someone whose whole income comes from fiction. I'm not alone, either. Quite a few writers have portfolio existences: income comes from a variety of places. My income comes from roughly the same sources as Sean Williams but all the proportions are different. No two writers will have quite the same division, but almost all of us have money from more than one source. Sometimes it evens out the rollercoaster. Sometimes it makes it nauseatingly topsy-turvy.

That's a really good place to finish for today. I'll give you the second post tomorrow or maybe later tonight, depending on when the heatwave breaks. Please forgive any addling of the brain in these posts: it's been a difficult week.