I got an email a few weeks ago from a young man just graduating from college, an aspiring writer, who wanted to know which careers I thought might be most conducive to the writing life. I suspect the answer might be Fire Lookout. Or maybe Monk. Professional Writer seems promising, at least at first glance, but turns out to entail all kinds of stuff that’s not actually writing.
In fact, I’m not in the greatest position to answer this question. Aside from college stints as a waiter and a rock climbing instructor and a short time immediately after graduation in which I worked at a halfway house for convicted felons, the only job I’ve ever had, the one I held from my early twenties until I quit to write full time, was teaching. For all I know, Professional Water Skier might facilitate the hell out of some good writing, but I can only talk teaching. Continue reading
Writing a fantasy series is a strange and daunting process. Over the course of transforming a single book into a series, I personally realized that rather than planning a whole series in advance, there were some basic things I could include that would allow a series to create itself.
A few months ago I stumbled across a Twitter discussion that changed the way I look at my reading habits – both past and present. I have since forgotten who was involved, which is unfortunate because, like a good academic, I prefer to cite my sources. Essentially, ideas of “deep” and “shallow” reading in genre circles were tabled (without attaching any value judgements to either term). In this sense deep meant reading all the works and series of relatively few authors – typically favourites – and shallow referred to someone who reads single texts by a lot of different authors. This was something I hadn’t really thought about. I started asking those difficult questions – the kind we aim at ourselves. What kind of reader am I? What kind of reader have I been in the past? 
Civilian Reader 