Day Job? I Wish!

A cautionary tale from a novelist who shouldn’t be writing full time

Photo by kate.sade on Unsplash

While I was living in New York in my early 20s — still a few years before Facebook and Twitter and Meetup — I’d sometimes browse the Craigslist activity-partner listings hoping to connect with other aspiring writers. The interactions that followed essentially amounted to platonic first dates, which could feel a little awkward when meeting up with straight men. The most memorable of these was Remy, who sent me a link to another Craigslist ad he’d posted advertising a corpse under “free stuff.” Ideal for anatomical research, he wrote. Please arrange for pick-up as soon as possible. I laughed, uneasily. It was only a joke, and anyway I was definitely going to be meeting him in a public place.

Remy lived in a studio apartment in the East Village. He told me he’d quit his job to focus on his writing, and in the meantime he was living off his credit cards. We chatted amiably over drinks, but inwardly I was shrieking I’m sorry if this sounds judgmental but quitting your job was a TERRIBLE IDEA. My God, the rent he must have been paying living solo in Manhattan! I never did say what I was thinking, but there isn’t a doubt in my head that the older, wiser version of Remy would agree with me.

I eventually left my job as an editorial assistant to go for an M.A. in Writing at NUI Galway, and I didn’t quit my day job after I sold my first novel because I didn’t have a day job to quit. After graduation I came home from Ireland, got a part-time job at Jo-Ann Fabrics, and told myself I’d take a few months to figure out what to do next.

An ad for a travel writer appeared on Craigslist — the writer would be putting together a brand-new Ireland guidebook, singlehandedly — and suddenly the way forward seemed clear again, or at least the way forward for the next nine months or so. I assembled a 67-page proposal when the ad asked for twenty. I got the gig, headed back to Ireland in January of 2006, and took the happy phone call about my debut novel at a hostel in Connemara. Even after I repaid my student loan, the money was enough to keep me for a while, two years or more. I figured I could afford to “focus on my writing.”

Since then there have been flush times and the-very-opposite-of-flush times, and…