On October 4th, 1993, which is 21 years ago today, I became a professional writer.<\/p>\n
Technically, I’d been paid for writing before – in June 1990, when I was 19 years old, a small-press magazine agreed to pay me \u00a313.75 (0.5p a word) for my short story\u00a0The View from the Window<\/em>. But one cheque doesn’t make you a professional.<\/p>\n So I consider today to be the 21st anniversary of me becoming a writer. For the past two-and-a-bit decades, every penny I’ve earned has been through putting\u00a0one word after another. Words have fed, clothed, housed, and entertained me. I hate to think how many thousands of words I’ve produced over the years. How many pages.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the words that I’m paid to produce are technical words in technical manuals. I’d much rather I made a living through writing fiction, but that’s not the way things have turned out. Despite being made redundant three times, I’ve always found it relatively easy to make a living through technical writing. By contrast, that \u00a313.75 I made for my first short story is the only money I’ve ever made writing fiction.<\/p>\n We were digging through some boxes recently and found an album of photos that we took in Rome in 1991. My girlfriend\u00a0was studying art history, and I was studying classics, so we spent the best part of a month living in a tent just off the Via Aurelia, filling our days with\u00a0visits to archaeological sites and tracking down Berninis and Caravaggios. The young man I was then had no idea he was going to spend 21 years as a technical author. What would he have thought? He wanted to be a\u00a0proper<\/em> writer. Have I disappointed him? Or did he realise, even back then, that making it as\u00a0a writer was an unlikely outcome? I can’t remember. Would he be angry at all the years I’ve wasted by not taking fiction writing seriously? I mean, I’m 44 years old, and I only managed to complete my first novel two years ago. If I’d started ten or fifteen years earlier, I might have been published by now.<\/p>\n Ha! He was the one who started all those novels in university and didn’t finish them! If he’s disappointed in me, then I can be a bit miffed with him, too. The slacker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On October 4th, 1993, which is 21 years ago today, I became a professional writer. Technically, I’d been paid for writing before – in June 1990, when I was 19 years old, a small-press magazine agreed to pay me \u00a313.75 (0.5p a word) for my short story\u00a0The View from the Window. But one cheque doesn’t… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-5E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}