{"id":254,"date":"2012-06-03T06:56:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-03T06:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/2012\/06\/03\/a-life-in-which-writing-is-never-a-priority\/"},"modified":"2012-06-03T06:56:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-03T06:56:00","slug":"a-life-in-which-writing-is-never-a-priority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/2012\/06\/03\/a-life-in-which-writing-is-never-a-priority\/","title":{"rendered":"A Life in Which Writing Is Never a Priority"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n

A day or so ago The Golden Eagle<\/a> made a post in which she asked, “Would you write if you knew you’d never be published?” Of course I thought about it and subsequently replied, but my reply made me think a lot about the role of writing in my life…especially now.<\/p>\n

My reply was basically “Yes, but not as much.” More complicated than that, as I will get into further here soon. As most of you know now, I’m recently unemployed (by choice) and living with my parents again (by choice…well, er, kinda. I have money but no income so I don’t feel like wasting my savings, you know? Especially when I still have loans.) I live in a dinky little town in super rural Oregon where jobs are non-existent, and I don’t drive let alone have a car. This means I’ve got a lot of free time. And since my dream has always been to be a successful published author…well guess what I’m working towards full steam now? Yup. Publishing. <\/p>\n

So, if I knew by some whim that I would never be published, would I still write? Look, I am not Idealist Hildred. I’m more certainly not Optimistic Hildred. I am Realist Hildred, to the core of  my little blackened no1curr soul. No. No I would not. I would be out there hitting the pavement harder than ever, pushing myself into random people’s houses in the valley looking for a 9-5 to make ends meet and find some sort of direction for my financial future. Because writing is my job. It’s my career<\/i>. Without publishing I don’t have much chance at a good career.<\/p>\n

My dream is to not only be successful financially, but successful because people like my work as well. Because they look forward to the next book I want to publish. Without being published I have no future dreams, or at least nothing as strong and important to me. I would still write, of course, because it’s the best, but it would be a back-burner hobby. At best I would write a page a week, instead a few a day. And be pretty miserable at my 9-5, more than likely. <\/p>\n

Thank God I’m going to be published, eh?<\/p>\n

What about you, in case you don’t follow The Eagle? <\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A day or so ago The Golden Eagle made a post in which she asked, “Would you write if you knew you’d never be published?” Of course I thought about it and subsequently replied, but my reply made me think a lot about the role of writing in my life…especially now. My reply was basically… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[107,44,73,49,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-question","category-real-life","category-self-publishing","category-writing","category-writing-as-a-career"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRtqI-46","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hildred-billings.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}