Working-Class Writer

I wake up every morning around six. I make coffee, maybe cook breakfast, and try to squeeze in a few words before I venture off to the day job in my 1998 Ford Ranger, which I’ve been driving since 2006. The truck has no heat or ac and needs a universal joint replaced, all of which I cannot afford to have repaired. During the day I’m a home maintenance technician, which is a fancy, politically correct way of saying I’m a maintenance man—more specifically, a maintenance man for two apartment complexes. It’s far from being a glamorous gig, but it’s an honest one, and it pays the bills and allows me to continue my writing endeavors.

I’m not embarrassed by having a day job. It doesn’t make me a failure as a writer, or inferior as an artist. In fact, if you are one who works your ass off at a full-time job, helping to provide for your family, and are still striving to fulfill your writing dreams, or any dream, I admire you. I really do. I’ve held many jobs throughout the years. I’ve called myself a machinist, a metal fabricator, delivery driver, and when I was fifteen I bagged groceries, and all the while I made time to write. It’s a disease, writing, I’m sure of it, but a disease of which I hope I’m never cured. I am a writer, an artist, that’s my job, my life’s passion. My writing doesn’t pay all my bills, but it's what I do and it’s who I am.

If you’re a writer then you know you can never stop writing. I couldn’t if I tried, no matter how many other jobs I had. On the days I don’t produce words, I feel a lingering gloom. It’s an emotion that will pass only when I place pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. If, one day, destiny calls and I become a fulltime writer and I’m able to work from the cozy confines of my home, I will consider myself very fortunate—but I’m a realist. If I’m forced to continue waking at six in the morning to head to my day job, then so be it. I’ll continue writing just as I have all these years, with conviction, obsession, and psychotic impulses that are out of my control.