I spent the vast majority of my working life as a professional economist. All day, every day, I worked with figures in spreadsheets that were in the millions, if not more. I talked with business owners rich in dollars, but poor in happiness and satisfaction. Interestingly, the entrepreneurs going bankrupt weren’t, on the whole, any less happy.

But I digress. One thing that happens to economists is they get a warped view of money. Maybe it happens to others dealing with large bankrolls, but I can only speak from my experience.

On one end of a spectrum are most economists. They value money a little too much for their own good. It becomes an end, as if having money somehow protects you from the vicissitudes of life. A security blanket made of paper and ink if you will. Money becomes more than a medium of exchange to get the goods and services you require. It becomes something to seek with all the skill and effort you can muster, damn the torpedos or the family. An idol in the Church of Molech.

On the other end of the spectrum, a few economists lose all respect for money. It becomes nothing more than a play token that, while necessary, is not important in their lives. It’s why the saying “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money” is such a quintessential economist quip.

This latter approach, toward which I lean, is born of a life-time of luck and privilege. Yes, I budget, tracking the comings and goings of money like a teller at the bank, but it seems so unreal. Like I could just as easily be counting stones or seashells—which, come to think of it, I would if born in another era and culture.

In short, I don’t worry about whether I’ll have enough to live out my life in comfort, even though as it stands I won’t. I trust that more will come my way, probably because it always has as long as I put in the work.

That is why I spend so much time, with no immediate hope of renumeration, at developing the craft of writing. In academics, you learn to invest early and often, hoping somewhere down the line the payoff will come. Most people around me don’t understand this approach. They require a short-term payback, not just as compensation for hours worked, but also as a validation of their effort.

Writers are a different breed, much like the small group of economists who look somewhat askance at money. Sure, they’d like to get paid for their art, but deep down, most know they won’t. At least not now. If enough books are written, then later. When the skills are honed, and the backlist  large enough to think about marketing.

The ability to delay gratification doesn’t make a writing vocation more virtuous than any other. Most writers will pursue other forms of employment to make ends meet, thereby turning their art into an avocation. Maybe that is what it should be, right from the beginning.

It’s what I did, at least until I gained a big enough financial cushion and a wide enough range of experiences to think I might make a go at this thing called “writing for a living.”

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

– Ray Bradbury, as quoted in Advice to Writers, Jon Winokur, 2000

Books about writing are strewn across my desk. Some have catchy titles, others not. My favorite is “Good Naked” by Joni B. Cole, with “The Right to Write” by Julia Cameron a close second.

These works are chock full of wisdom and advice. Or so I assume. I’ve not read them.

I’ll be straight up honest with you. My writing isn’t as good as it could be. Heck, it’s not as good as it once was. That’s what happens when you go a few decades without setting a creative pen to paper.

I have a lot to learn and relearn, and not a lot of time. I’m entering my seventh decade. Family genetics suggests I’ll last well into my ninth. But if I’m going to leave behind a worthy body of work, it’s way past time to get moving.

So I write. And rewrite. With each story, and each iteration of a story, I try to get a little better. I’ve plucked the low hanging fruit of improvement. Now’s the time to scale a ladder and get at the upper branches.

So I need to read the craft books on my desk. I need to read the ones I’ve yet to purchase. Each will teach me something—if only that some writers don’t know squat about craft. The hard part is putting the ego aside and accepting the fact that no matter how far I’ve come, there’s an almost infinite road ahead. But at the end of the road lies an infinitely improved writer.

Hey, a guy’s allowed to dream, isn’t he?