Someone didn't work very hard last year!

March 2024 paid newsletter

This is not to put my tax guy on blast. He’s a good dude, at least as far as I can tell during my annual one-hour interactions with him. He does math so I don’t have to.

This year, when we were adding my writing income to one of the thousand forms, he (jokingly!) commented that I must have been lazy in 2023.

I (gently!) corrected him, briefly explaining the concept of advances. And that 2023 was one of the busiest, most difficult writing years of my publishing career so far.

I didn’t talk about writing and rewriting and re-rewriting a book for months, taking a different book through production, editing yet another book, and trying to develop a new idea even though I was clearly burned out. I didn’t mention all my promotional efforts, the time I spent traveling, or the skills I continued refining in order to keep up with new technology. I didn’t tell him that I’d written two dozen free newsletters on writing and publishing, released a book (and experienced all the feelings that come with that), and then spent two months knitting hats because that was all I could manage.

This is the takeaway, though:

Writing output does not always equal writing income.

This isn’t a job where you’re rewarded for showing up, let alone how hard you work. If it were, I know a lot of authors who’d be absolutely loaded.

But enough about writing. I’ve been thinking about other “invisible” work. Or maybe I should say typically unacknowledged work. Under-appreciated work. Particularly of the unpaid variety.

Like the mental effort of tracking household schedules and expenses. The ceaseless fight against entropy and floating tufts of cat fur. The emotional labor of keeping relationships alive. To name a few things.

And — I swear this is related — one of the books I read this month was I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED. It wasn’t something I’d been planning to read, but it came up as immediately available in the library, so I checked it out. And man. That was tense. Like, the whole way.¹

As with last month, this isn’t a review, just some related thoughts. Not just about the book, but about how we value (or don’t value) this sort of work.