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