But for those to fearful to click on it without an abstract, it is about the myth that only a few can earn enough to write full time.

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Besides I think I am known well enough on Hatrack not to be considered a spammer.

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Well it wouldn't be the first time a doppleganger attacked. I don't know how many of you were around for the extra Survivor incident, man that was a ride.

However...

The comments section is where the "meat" is.

DWS says: "If you write two short stories per year and one novel per year, you will never get there, at least not in a generation or two. But if you write three novels per year and a dozen short stories per year, it won’t take you long at all to pick up real speed and practice enough to learn your craft."

Sounds like there's going to be some quantity v quality issues, but, if you can achieve that output, and actually sell it, then more power to you.

Except, I reminded myself that I have a full time job. Two, if you include raising my kids.

I immediately concluded that such a pace would be attainable only if I did not have to work for a living.

Disturbing as it was, I realized I was abstaining from even making an attempt at the pace I wanted.

Obviously, that mindset is on its way out of my thought process. Now, I still might not match that desired output level, but I see no sense in denying myself the opportunity to strive for it.

Actually...after reading DWS's passage, I'm thinking that a three novel per year output sounds pretty damned cool.

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I'd appreciate it if people would preface links with some kind of indication of what they link to.

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Personally I think the increased output thing is about increasing your experience writing, this is the same thing as you need to write a million (actual numbers may vary) words of pure crap before you start get good. So it's a quantity makes quality thing. (Well, we should hope that your hundredth story is better than your third.)

Personally I think there is a logical fallacy hidden somewhere in the mindset that writing fast has less quality and writing slow has more quality. There are much more variables that go into it. When I write fast I usually produce a more cohesive story, when I go slow I tend to go off on irrelevant things that I end up cutting later. I lose focus when I write slow.

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Jk Rowling did pretty good with one novel a year, she's richer than the queen.

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Ah, but what will she do for a followup act?

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Become the queen? Spend the money? Laugh in a 'Maw-hah-hah' stylie?

Great link, if nobody has read it yet.

Kris and Dean covered this in their June workshop. Really an eye-opening moment for me. I think most of us are so focused on break-in and those first sales/advances, we don't stop to consider that a well-managed portfolio of books and stories can yield decades of dividends.

Like I mentioned at this particular post, writer Williams Sanders -- now retired -- got a tidy little three-digit check a month or two ago. For something he wrote YEARS in the past, and had all but forgotten about. PING! A check shows up in his mailbox one day, and it was because of something in his contracting for that very story; and he'd forgotten all about it.

It seems like mass-market and genre authors put out a book a year or so. I'm predisposed to think that anyone who published four novels a year would be writing dross. Now that I think about it, though, the only reason I believe that one novel a year is the average rate of a quality author is how often the books hit the market.