
Earlier this year, we spent some time with Nick Mamatas, the genre-bending novelist with a popular LiveJournal page. Mamatas spoke frankly about the writing lifestyle, discussing everything from school to health insurance:
"I'm a full-time writer. I'm going back to school so I can get an MFA at a low-residency program where I can write the stories and articles I would anyway, and get credit for them.Potentially, this can lead to a university job in two or three years.
"I do a lot of feature articles, which pay much better than fiction, and write educational copy as well, for standardized tests and that sort of thing. I certainly don't support myself all that well, and I have no health insurance. "Now if I did go balls-to-the-wall with getting corporate writing gigs, I could probably do a lot better, but what little fiction and interesting non-fiction I do manage to write would suffer. For now, I'd rather just live humbly."
If you have writing advice to contribute, drop me a line, and I'll in a future Greatest Hits post...







Comment Preview