Reprints and Trusting the Process

Writing is a funny business.

Case in point: I signed a reprint contract for a short-story this morning. It’s not the first time this story has been reprinted (and, Gods willing, it won’t be the last), but this reprint means that a single story of around 7,000 words has earned me more money in the space of four years than all five novellas I’ve written put together.

There’s nothing surprising about this – it’s how writing works. You write things and you keep writing things and eventually some of the things you wrote a while back come around and start earning you money again.

But it’s timely, this coming through this week, ’cause I recently made the decision to cut back my hours at the Writers Centre a little in order to free up a second day each week that can be devoted to writing. Part of me – the part that frets about the mortgage – keeps looking at that decision and wondering if was going to come back and bite me.

In the short term? Almost certainly, yes. I’ve more-or-less forgotten all the financial habits I’d built up through years of contracting and freelance work, which means I need to re-learn them.

In the long term, well. I got a lot of things I wanna get written, and I have a fair idea how much that extra day a week is worth.

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Nine days left in the month of July. Three writing things that need to be done before the end of the month, which brings me to the end of my current writing commitments.

Time to figure out what comes next.