Linzé's Mischief: 30 October 2016

How do you stare fear in the eyes and win?

What is holding me back from chasing my dream of writing full-time? I have been asking myself this question for many months now and I still don't have an answer.

The facts:

• I cannot make a living from my writing.
• I cannot expect my husband to support me financially. It would be grossly unfair to him since it is not his fault that my writing cannot pay my share of the bills.
• My day job is incredibly stressful and my physical health is suffering because of it. Thanks to my writing, I do cope well from a mental health point of view. Something I am grateful for.

Considering my options...

The obvious choice would be to find another job. And it turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I am employed as a senior project manager. Outside of the military industry, I am unable to find the same job, because I don't have experience in software development where most of the project management jobs are these days.

Nor do I have the qualifications for the second most number of jobs in project management - construction. You need to have a mechanical or civil engineering background; I have an electronics engineering degree and it is not in software development.

Yes, I am an engineer, but I have been out of that game for almost ten years. Also not sure if I want to go back there.

The third choice would be to take a pay cut. And unbelievably, everyone in this country seems to think the only reason to find another job is to make more money. Yes, for most people that may be true, but I am not most people. So that option is clearly an impossibility, to my greatest frustration.

Plan A, because it worked before.

So I am back to staring at the monster in my life: what do I do? If I was ten years younger, plan A would have been to start my own business (again) and just go for it. I know what it entails since I had been down that road with success. But that was engineering, and yeah, that ship has sailed.

Ten years on and I am thinking about the issues involving retirement. Can I afford to retire? Thankfully, retirement is not the financial mountain I had feared (thanks to good advice when I was young). I am not going to live in the lap of luxury (not that I do that right now), but abject poverty has been averted because of listening to the aforementioned advice.

But I am too young to retire, so that isn't much of an option right now.

What about Plan B?

Plan B would be to start another company that has something to do with writing, my passion. But would yet another publishing company survive? There are already so many out there.

I registered Muses and Broomsticks (Pty) Ltd, and yes, it is a publishing company albeit with a slight difference. And so the fear remains.

Plan C?

In my immediate future, I am going to do NaNoWriMo, edit and publish Waiting for Adrian, and move on to writing the fifth novel in the series. So the status quo continues...and with it a victorious monster. For now.

It took me so much longer than usual to hit 'publish' on this post. But I managed to slay this monster. I will slay the big one too. One day.

Until next time!

Linzé