Happy New Year

Q.

Hi George! I hope you are well and looking forward to your upcoming book tour!

I love Story Club. Your generosity and warmth are a balm in a world that often feels both surprisingly savage and terribly fragile. You are a dear person.

My question is less about craft and more about commerce. Or maybe, when you strip away the details, at its heart, it’s really a question about existential dread? Maybe you can help me figure that out.

I came to writing late in life and rather recently. I knew, even as a little girl growing up in Chicagoland, that I wanted to be a writer. Instead, I became a divorced mother with two little girls and no education. Fast forward: The kids are grown, I have excellent health insurance, and I can afford groceries every week. (Yay!) So, now I am writing.

Of course, finding time to write can be difficult. I assume this is the case for all writers, especially those with full-time jobs outside of writing. Still, I’m not seeking encouragement to keep carving out time to write because to older people, I think, writing is like getting to go outside to play. Instead, I am wondering about spending time pursuing publication.

After all, time becomes more precious when there is less of it to lose.

Let’s say you, George, were the age you are now, but you were currently working at that engineering firm as a technical writer and counting the days until you could retire, hopefully, if all went well, at age seventy. Of course you would keep writing. But would you keep trying to get published? It seems incredibly time-consuming and perhaps a bit soul-crushing.

Sure, it looks like great fun to be in conversation with Deborah Treisman or signing books after a successful reading, but the effort to get there seems superhuman.

Perhaps, like tearing off a roof or curing a hangover with fast food, publishing may be a young man’s game.

Yes, the argument exists that one can simply write for the enjoyment of it and never seek publication but if I were a chef who spent a year or more perfecting recipes to prepare a feast, I would want, eventually, to share that meal with others. Besides, I think it may be an end point, publication, that encourages a writer to keep working until they reach that point. And