Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

As from 15th January, I will no longer have a day job. I am going to write children’s books full time.

 

Don’t think I don’t know how crazy this is. Credit is crunching, publishers are retrenching and Woolies has gone bust. Nonetheless.

 

My blogs usually sink faster than the Titanic but hopefully this one will be different. Why? Because it has a PURPOSE (Ta-dah!).

 

The purpose is as follows:

To be a record/ scrapbook/ diary of my first year as a full time children’s writer.

 

This makes it useful to me, because I tend to work ideas and emotions through by writing about them, also it’s good to have some kind of a diary to remind me what I’m doing this for. And it might even be useful to other people, who are wondering what it might be like to be a full time writer. (It might be like this. It might not. Everyone’s different).

 

I think it will be an interesting year, maybe even more so because of the recession. For example, three months ago, I did a budget to see how much money I’d have to live on over 2009. I live in the Eurozone, and since I did that budget, sterling’s fall against the euro means I have significantly less money than I thought I did. Oh well, I hear one can live perfectly well on lint.

 

I’m not going into this completely cold turkey. I have two books published, a third due out this year. For most of this year I’ve only been working part time. I am also perfectly prepared to go back to work (assuming there’s anyone left to hire me) if I run out of money. I know I’ll be writing books all my life, and I expect my income from it to wax and wane. More than likely, sooner or later I’ll have to get a job again. I won’t see that as a failure.

 

But this year, I have one main goal, (Another PURPOSE! Hooray!) and that’s the reason I am giving up the day job: I want to finish three of my half-started, half-finished children’s novels. And I want to get at least one of them placed somewhere. They’ve been on the back burner way too long. Time is, time was but time shall be no longer. Recession or no recession, sometimes you just have to take the plunge.

(See also: About)