I hope that I don’t land on too many stereotypes here. It would be really easy. If I do, please know that I’m not trying to be hurtful or reductive. This is all coming from a good place.

Specifically, it’s coming from an exhausted place. I just finished a very long work day. It’s Monday, and I forced myself to log off my work laptop and switch to this other system so that I could write this blog post and not screw up my writing goal on Day 2.

The title might suggest that I’m not a technical person. I very much am. I have been as long as I could remember. When I was very small, I would crawl behind the TV and switch the connections between the gaming system and the cable box. By “small” I mean, around 5 or 6. I somehow knew what I was doing.

Most of my day is spent trying to brain as hard as I can, and hope that I know what I’m doing. Sometimes the work can be very reactive, where things have gone wrong and they need to be fixed. Much of my time these days is spent in meetings. What I’m trying to say is that when you’re working a technical job, you can’t wait for the right muse or mood to inspire you. Whatever may be going on in your head and heart, you have to show up and do the work.

Some of the best artists I know also operate like that. The idea of waiting for a muse to whisper in the writer’s ear is a myth, and not a healthy one. You have to show up to work, whether your job is technical, creative, somewhere in between, or something completely different.

When I have opportunities these days to program, I do feel like I’m able to be creative and do creative things. In general, you don’t want your code to be too abstract or esoteric, because other people need to read it and there are standards to maintain. But a programmer generally has a lot of freedom when they’re coming up with solutions or designing a system. Some solutions are more efficient than others, but there are many to choose from.

So what am I bitching about? What’s the point of this?

The point is that in this stupid, capitalist world, a writer doesn’t make as much money as a programmer, mostly because art is not as valued. The point is that I must do the thing that pays the bills in order to afford to spend time on the job that I want to do.

And there are days like today where, once I’ve finished the Day Job, I don’t have a lot of mental energy left in the tank to spend on the dream job.

That’s the problem. Time is money, and in order to stay afloat, I must give the lion’s share of my time to something that does not feed my creative side.

In the past, I have tried to do all the things. There were a few years where I really tried to maintain the Day Job, writing side-gig, music hobby, and I even tried teaching kids how to program twice a week in an afterschool program. I was also trying to stay involved in an ongoing roleplaying game, be a Dad to my kids, a husband to my wife, and maintain my house. It was too much, and I ultimately didn’t do any of it very well.

I stopped teaching first. Then I dropped out of the bands. After that, I found equilibrium and was able to finish and actually publish stories.

It’s been over a year since I’ve finished any real stories. I can probably be forgiven for some of this year, as publishing The Repossessed Ghost took some time, and it was real authorly work. And I’ve been working very slowly on a follow-up story, and I have plans to work on a sequel novel in November.

But I still feel spread thin. Thin enough that repairing the flat tire on my car slipped through the cracks this morning and I barely noticed. That’s a sign that things are out of balance again.

I’m still going to keep showing up, though. I’m not going to quit.

There are days like today where once I leave the Day Job behind, it is very tempting to just go to sleep and hope for more time the next day, writing be damned. And I can tell you from experience that that way lies depression and burnout.