One Week Later: On Ambition

When I've thought about blogging this week, I've mostly wanted to expand on my claim that I'm going to become an illustrator. It's still true, but I wanted to give a bit of back-story. The problem is, I'm not sure where to start.

I'm not a very ambitious person by nature. Or, to put that another way, I'm pretty much a lazy slacker. I have my good qualities, but for most of my life they have not been in the hard work department. This is somewhat deliberate, in that for the most part the things that are really valuable to me - family, friends, interesting experiences - don't necessarily cost money, and in fact the more time and energy one puts towards professional goals, the less time one has for enjoying these other things. This is actually a very important belief of mine.

HOWEVER

It has come to my attention over the past few years that:

A) you probably need some money, and the harder and smarter you work the faster you can usually get it,

and,

B) doing interesting, useful stuff and making money from it isn't necessarily impossible. Or, at least, some work is more interesting, useful, and probably less of a waste of life than, say, working in a convenience store.

I started having stunning revelations on this subject when I was pregnant with River, and I realized that I really really didn't want a full-time career, a really incredibly shitty low-paying part-time job, or an expectation that James would support me while I stayed home with the baby. The remaining option was to get paid for doing something reasonable and flexible, and for the first time in my life I really put effort towards this goal. Specifically, instead of just sitting around reading magazines and secretly believing that I could be writing for them, which I had plenty of experience with already, I spent quite a lot of time writing sample articles and searching for places to submit them online.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I've basically pulled my weight financially by writing and editing web content, while only spending a day or so per week on this work. This was a second revelation. I'd felt a bit like a fraud when I started applying for writing work, and even more so when I started describing myself as a writer. But the fact is, I can apparently do it, and the only thing that had to change to make it happen was my perception of the possibility.

EXCELLENT!

And yet, I've recently started to realize that I've hit another sort of dead-end. The assignments that I get regularly pay very little for professional writing, and besides I depend far too much on two major contracts. Together James and I make enough to live reasonably, but just barely. I have a lot of hang-ups about financial success, probably enough for at least one more whole post, but in short the fact is that it really would be nice if we could make some more money. There are a lot of nice and useful things that we could do if we had a little more slip in our budget, and James has certainly been doing his part to work on this situation.

For me, I've been really starting to feel that I needed to make another leap professionally - probably either working up lots of high-quality samples and putting more effort into getting better writing jobs, or else learning more about internet business, design and marketing (I've been working on it) and starting my own for-profit sites where I could collect all the profit from my articles instead of just a tiny percentage. And then, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "hey, if I can become a professional writer, there are probably other interesting things I could do for money. And if I'm going to have to put a lot more time and effort into this career thing, anyway, isn't there anything I'd rather be doing than web/magazine writing?" And of course, the answer that immediately came to me is I'd rather be illustrating. So.

I'm going to become an illustrator. I've been working on samples and submitting them online, just like I did when I started writing. And, I'm still thinking about making some monetized websites of my own in the meantime, since the writing thing seems to be working out for now. I just have to figure out exactly how that's all going to work, but that's a whole other post for another day.