The Realities of a Full-Time Writer

I've been writing and working for a living my entire adult life.  During the course of a successful 35-year career in Corporate America, I managed to simultaneously author fifteen novels, seven of which were eventually published.  There were also two anthologies, a plethora of short stories and articles, and let's not forget the online magazine I've been publishing for 20 years.

No flies on this guy.

But as of March 1, 2018, something has happened that I never expected, at least not at the (not so) tender age of fifty-seven.  I've retired.  Suddenly, I find myself with time on my hands, time to write, time to edit, and time to think about what to write or edit next.  In short, I've become what I always dreamed of becoming: a full-time writer.

Yay, me!

Of course, few dreams are ever fully realized.  Yes, I have the time to write but, thus far, I haven't found a way to make my writing pay in any substantial manner.  And, believe me, I've tried.  I have this goal in retirement.  Until recently, I always thought it to be a reasonable and completely attainable goal.  Now, well, I'm not sure.  Basically, I want to earn $20,000 a year either writing or doing writing-related activities.  Just twenty thou ... not so much, right?

Hmm.

The way to do this, of course, is to set up a series of income streams, sources of income that are more or less independent of one another and which can be nurtured and grown separately.  This way, if one stream starts under-performing, for whatever reason, the others can pick up the slack.  At least, that's the theory.

So that's what I've been working on since March 1st.  I didn't retire blindly.  I knew this was coming and, as such, I put together a plan of what I thought those income streams would be.  Of course, as the saying goes, "Man plans; God laughs," and things haven't worked out quite a lucratively as I would have liked ... yet.

In future blog entries, I'm hoping to review some of the streams there were successful and some that weren't, and visit with you the hidden tripwires in each.  Maybe some of you will be able to find use for the this hard-won wisdom.  I hope so.

In any event, please feel free to tag along.  I have no real idea of how successful all of this is going to be.

But I'm looking forward to finding out.

- Ty Drago​