Friday, December 30, 2005

Nurture Discontent

We recently bought a new map-of-the-world shower curtain to replace the moldy old kitty-cat one, and I was surprised to find it fostering discontent in me in an unexpected way.

I've always wondered if there isn't someplace in the world where we could live, comfortably and safely, on nothing but my income from freelance writing, which currently makes up about 15% of our total household income. We both have decent day jobs which are not too unbearable, but they take up way too much time that could be spent on writing a novel, learning French, baking our own bread, raising a puppy, reading the whole Bible including the boring parts, running a frame-by-frame comparison between the new Wizard of Oz DVD and the unremastered version, sleeping without an alarm clock every single day -- everything, in fact, besides sitting at a desk at some day job.

I don't know where that mythical place is where we can live on my writing money, but thanks to the shower curtain I now have a lot of possibilities lined up. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in the Aleutians," I'll say out of nowhere. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Archangel'sk." The southern horn of Africa is the part closest to the toilet. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Fianarantsoa. Maybe we can live on my writing money in Gaborone."

I don't really want to live in Africa; my notions of what weather and landscape should be are pretty firmly within a few degrees of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. I would rather live on my writing money in Dun Laoghaire or Gimmelwald or the Catskills, if I thought I could. But I've heard of all those places, which jacks up the cost of living, I figure.

Anyway, I can't spend too much time on that kind of thinking -- I have to get back to work.

Word Count: 2,736 (+1,069)

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Trust in yourself. Only you can know if the characters are true to the story that you must tell. We are patiently waiting to hear what they have to tell us. The story will be stronger because you are so courageous to write what is true for you.

1:59 PM  

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