By Emily Shultz
1. Come home in a foul mood from your office job in Mississauga (or some other horrid suburb). Spend at least an hour and a half each day commuting. Do this for many days, weeks, months. Waste your little free time by crying in the street. All of this is best done if there’s an audience. Don’t fake it–don’t act sad, etc. Let the bad feelings come on their own. This should be easy. After all, you’re working for a multi-national company and are essentially a toad, hired only as a friend/whipping post to your supervisor.
2. Develop insomnia. And maybe spastic bowels. That’s always a good one too.
3. Have your boyfriend threaten to leave you if you don’t quit and devote yourself to full-time writing.
4. Apply for grants. Wait. Get rejected. Wait some more. Finally! $1500!
5. Quit. It’s not as hard as you think.
6. Give up the idea of a real home with a back yard or a kitchen. Move yourself and your dog into your boy’s “dream” apartment… a studio, a.k.a. converted industrial garage without any natural light.
7. Merge destinies in some way, shape, or form. In other words, join forces, bank accounts, get married (the relatives love that). It helps if this person has blind faith in your art. If they can also lend you $200 now and again, even better.
8. Justify video-game playing as an essential part of working at home. Plunk down $30 on retro magazines also as “research” for your novel.
9. Sleep in ’til noon.
10. Wake up one day and realize your grant money is almost gone and you still have six or seven chapters to write before you’re done your rocky first-draft.
11. Email everyone you know with no thoughts of how pathetic you sound. Ask if they know of any part-time/ freelance work.
12. Get an interview with a major women’s magazine. Get sick that week, and stumble into your interview hoping to make a good impression, a wad of Kleenex in the pocket of your only suit. You’re doing great until halfway through when your decongestants seem to run out. When they ask you what you’d do to make their magazine better, pick on absolutely everything. When they ask you what your best qualities are, tell them you’re “nice.” When they tell you how much you’d be earning, don’t hold back– laugh. Laugh right out loud. It’s clear you’re not ready to go back to a full-time job.
13. Hound some more friends for part-time work until one of them takes pity and gets you a regular gig that you can do from home…writing the weather for the Naked News. Keep sleeping in ’til noon.
14. Subsist on this for many months, using your Visa as a crutch.
15. Copy edit a couple of feminist detective novels.
16. Drop hints to your mother about vet bills and car repairs. Act surprised when she pays off your Visa.
17. Get a second credit card but don’t tell her about this one. After all, you have your pride! And now, even more debt.
18. Publish a collection of short fiction. Give away more copies than you can afford. Wind up in debt to your publisher. Wonder privately if you can wait and pay off what you owe with your royalties cheque…
19. At the peak of poverty, decide to start your own chapbook series. What genius! You now have yet another major expense!
20. Interview for two jobs simultaneously. One is an interesting art-related three-day-a-week gig with a good salary. The other pays half as much and requires maximum commitment.
21. Don’t even wait to hear back from the first one. Take the one that pays half as much. Thank you and God bless Broken Pencil!
Emily Schultz is the new editor of Broken Pencil. Her stories Black Coffee Night were recently published and she is tackling rewrites of her novel.