With Ulysses

Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a working writer is deciding how to spend the limited time you have to write.  Since I had a completely non-lucrative life as a non-fiction author while working in academia I have found those who decide whether to publish you or not often consider your last book and its sale track.  That can be bad news for those of us who were once college professors.

It’s not impossible for an employed professor to become a novelist.  Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist and yet because of literature professor after writing Lolita.  Umberto Eco was an academic when he broke out with The Name of the Rose.  Carl Sagan published Contact.  The list could go on, but need not.  You get the point.  It may be difficult, but not impossible.

I’ve written five novels since earning my doctorate, and three non-fiction books.  Of these only one has been published, and it is my least favorite of all.  That’s the way the publishing business works.  It may not always represent your best efforts.

Over the past several months I’ve been working on non-fiction.  I can feel the creative pressures building up inside as I deny their release day after week after month.  My non-fiction publishing was growing before then—I had short story number 20 published earlier this year, but since then the rejection letters have been rolling in and I haven’t had time to retaliate.  Such is the life of a working writer.

My pseudonym is my armor.  I’ve been writing for over four decades.  While in school my submissions always earned A’s in the real world they come back F’s.  Kind of makes you stop and think who’s writing the standards here.  I have yet to go the self-publishing route.  If nobody wants to hear what I have to say, I can accept that.

Both in fiction and non, it’s been a tough slog.  Those who bother to know me encourage me to keep going.  What else can a do?  What is a writer unless s/he writes?