by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1
A few Pros and Cons on Giving Up the Day Job
A few years ago I gave up a good paying job to write fulltime. This was before I had a contract, an agent or even a finished manuscript or markets for my freelance articles. Yeah, I know, I was crazy. Or maybe not. Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Pro: No boss to tell me what to do—you’re your own boss.
Con: Yeah, right. That’s not exactly true. If a writer wants to get published, the boss is discipline. Discipline makes you show up at the computer every day.
Pro: I can work in my pjs.
Con: But what do you do when the UPS guy rings the doorbell at 3 pm and you’re still in your pjs?
Pro: Job Security. What? How can you have job security as a freelance writer???? If you’re selling to a lot of markets and one dries up, you have the others to fall back on. And as for novels, Indie publishing is a great avenue. You’ll have to do all the work, but in the end, you own it!
Con: It may take a little while to get money coming in on a regular basis, and you’ll have to work hard…but if you are working for someone else, you’re working hard anyway. Oops that sounds like a pro…
Pro: You set your own hours. Maybe you’re a night owl and do your best work between the hours or 11 pm and 5 am. The regular job field is not always night-owl friendly.
Con: You have to set your own hours. You can’t dilly-dally. You can’t write when the muse hits.
This has been a little tongue-in-cheek look at quitting your day job. Quitting your day job may not be an option. Or maybe you want to quit your day job and write full time because you think writing is a glamorous job. It isn’t. It is the hardest job I’ve ever had. And yes it is a job. Having a deadline means putting your seat in a chair and typing whether you want to or not. Whether you have the words or not. You.Must.Write. Otherwise there’s nothing to fix. Nothing to rewrite.
It’s Elvis Week in Memphis, and homicide Detective Rachel Sloan isn’t sure her day could get any stranger when aging Elvis impersonator Vic Vegas asks to see her. But when he produces a photo of her murdered mother with four Elvis impersonators–one of whom had also been murdered soon after the photo was taken–she’s forced to reevaluate. Is there some connection between the two unsolved cases? And could the recent break-in at Vic’s home be tied to his obsession with finding his friend’s killer?
When yet another person in the photo is murdered, Rachel suddenly has her hands full investigating three cases. Lieutenant Boone Callahan offers his help, but their checkered romantic past threatens to get in the way. Can they solve the cases before the murderer makes Rachel victim number four?
Patricia Bradley lives in North Mississippi with her rescue kitty Suzy and loves to write suspense with a twist of romance. Her books include the Logan Point series and two Harlequin Heartwarming romances. Justice Delayed, a Memphis Cold Case Novel, is the first book in her next series and it releases January 31, 2017. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.