I've been putting off a conversation with my dear friend and beta reader about my work, but it's time to go for a walk and try to put feelings about my future into words.

(Thank you, @joycereynoldsward, by the way, for your comments the other day. I have to let go of the idea that I'm ever going to make enough money to fix the biggest problem in my life, and make choices for the work that will let me live as best I can in a life that will always be a little bit broken on the security front. 👍🏻)

@MLClark yeah. The problem with hoping you can make money off of writing is that there are no guarantees in this era--at least for fiction work. At this point I say "follow your heart," for fiction anyway.

@joycereynoldsward

There's no money in any of it. That's why it's tricky to know where to invest my time. I know I made more money with short stories than anything else - even more than with nonfiction news analysis. Depressing, but common right now. If you're not part of the "it" circles, you're nothing.

We are an overeducated population, skewed toward forms of white-collar work where the sheer numbers of us drive down any hope of making a living wage or otherwise "advancing". But so it goes.

@MLClark the bit about the "it" circles is so, so true. And it carries over to the self-publishing world as well. If you get into the right circles of recommendation, you can go far.

Me? I've always been a contrary witch, and the "it" circles don't like that. Sigh. It looks like this year is going to be another one where I earn more from editing and formatting work than I do the writing. But we'll see how The Cost of Power's launch goes.