A Writer in a Funk

I normally don’t put this type of thing in writing. I usually wait until the feeling has passed and then I move on as if it never happened, but today is different. Today I feel like I will work my way out of it faster if I put it in writing and send it out in to the world. 

I am in a funk. There’s no other way to put it. I’m finally averaging a few hundred dollars in sales every month. I know that sounds like nothing to some people, but it’s a lot for me. Most of my stories are less than a dollar and only a few are 2.99. I need hundreds of sales in order to make a few hundred dollars. I should be happy that people are finally, consistently buying a couple of my stories, but I’m not. I keep focusing on the fact that sales will probably drop off in a few months. 

For the last three years, I have sold myself on the promise that I would one day leave my day job behind and focus on making it as a writer. Unfortunately, the realist in me outweighs the dreamer. I’m not brave enough or stupid enough (depends on who you ask) to walk away from a job that is paying all of my bills without first having a way to replace my income. This presents a catch-22 because some days my job is mentally exhausting. My day job interferes with my writing. Sometimes, after I get home in the evening and I finish doing things for work, I don’t want to see a computer or a laptop or pen and paper. I just want to shut down and regroup so that I am ready to do it all over again the next day. Of course there are those days when a story is burning so violently inside me that I have to write it down, but I’m finding those days are becoming fewer and fewer and I think it’s because my reality is starting to sink in: I may never make it as a writer.

I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever quit my day job. I know part of my problem is my genre. I don’t write gay erotica, I write gay fiction. My stories aren’t all romance or sex and happy endings; my stories are about pain, dealing with emotional and family issues, and finding and accepting love. I’ve had a few people tell me that if I want to make money, I need to write in other genres. I used to scoff at them and happily proclaim that I didn’t write for the money. Now I’m not sure if I made the right decision. I will always write. I can’t help it. Even if no one ever reads my stories again, I’ll still be out there writing them, but at some point, I have to stop taking baby steps and make a giant leap. I don’t want to spend all of my life as someone who writes on the side, I want to spend at least part of my life as just a writer and nothing else. 

Now that I have said all of that, I acknowledge that there are a lot of things that I haven’t done that I should do and it is up to me to make some changes this year so that I am not in the same position at this time next year.