Quitting My Day Job

You know the old joke, “Don’t quit your day job?” Well, I juat did, quit my day job. I am excited and a little scared at the same time. 

I’ve been leading up to this moment for a long time. First, I wrote in little spurts when I didn’t have to grade papers, etc. when I was teaching English. Then I retired from that and got a 9 to 5 job, which was great because I had all my evenings and weekends to myself. I got a lot more writing done, and managed to complete three manuscripts. But I only wrote a few days a week, not entirely satisfying. I found myself loving my job, but thinking, “Darn, I have to go to work all day today.” My muse kept tugging on my sleeve until I couldn’t ignore her anymore.

I looked at all our sources of income, our expenses, all the variables I could think of and discovered that our pensions and my husband’s income could pay our bills. We had a heart-to-heart about it, and my gracious husband said, “You’ve supported all my wild ideas. If you want to quit your job, go for it.” Shortly after that I set a date, and now here we are. My last day at work was April 30, 2012.

I am so excited about this opportunity to write full-time. I already have a dream schedule for how to spend my days, ideas of what I’ll do now that I have the extra time to really focus on my writing. And it will feel so good to say “I am a writer,” instead of “I am a writer but my day job is.....” or “I write on the side and ....”

The scary parts--What if I’m not ready to publish yet? What if the furnace and the refrigerator die at the same time, or something worse happens?  Scary. Extra incentive to make money from my writing? Yes, that too. 

If the absolute worst happens, I guess I go back to work. But in the meantime I am a full-time writer. No dabbler in a hobby, no writer-hyphen-something else, but a real listen-to-the-muse-write-all-day, follow-your-dreams kind of writer. Woohoo!  

---Lynn Lovegreen

originally posted at www.lynnlovegreen.com