I gave up my college teaching job because I was sick of trying to juggle a regular job with writing. It wasn’t so much the lack of time, because I never worked very hard at teaching anyway. It was the lack of big blocks of time, the long stretches of uninterrupted time needed to write. In fact, my first published book only got finished because I got a three month sabbatical from work. If only it could be like this every day, I said to myself…
So I made it happen. I ditched the teaching job (and the generous pension scheme, the free laser printing and office supplies, the free secretarial support, phone and internet access, shit, shit, shit…) and moved to Spain to become a full-time writer. At last I would have days full of nothing but ‘the work in progress’, interrupted only by a stroll in a tree-lined park or a cafe con leche on a sun dappled terrace…
Okay. So, eight years later and I’m still here. And I’m still more or less a full-time writer, if you count being a now-and-then translator and literary dogsbody-for-hire. This was my schedule yesterday: Continue reading “Juggling”