Welcome to my page for part-time writers. It's fairly new, but I hope in time it will become a useful resource for people who want to write part-time, or for people who already do.

What's New: Ouch, first update in 4 months! I said I hoped to add a new article to this site every month and I didn't do it. Well, mea culpa, ashes, sackcloth and all that, but I had other things to worry about, like my so-called career, and besides this web site isn't making me any money, and plus there are probably only two people looking at it, if that, so it doesn't much matter. No new article, but I've added a new book to the reading list, one I recently discovered at my library. Check it out; it's really cool.

Good news: this site is now searchable in Google. Yay! Bad news: my hard drive may or may not be about to crash. So future updates to this site may be difficult. (If my hard drive crashes, that will be the least of my problems.) Also, the novel I'm working on is a higher priority than writing content for the site. So for the forseeable future, new articles will come out on a very irregular basis.

Web Site Raison d'Etre:

While many of us would love to make writing our full-time job, it is a fact of life that it can take a long time for a writer to make a living through writing alone. The exceptions are salaried jobs like journalist or technical writer, which may be fulfilling for some. Others--myself included--want to do more creative forms of writing, such as fiction or poetry. A novelist, after many years of hard work, may be able to support herself on her royalties. A poet or short-story writer, on the other hand, probably will never make enough through writing alone to support himself. So unless you are lucky enough to have inherited a fortune, or to have a spouse willing to support you, you will probably have to work at a "real" job, at least for a few years.

What I want to do here is explore the possibilities for that other job. A good job for a part-time writer should interfere as little as possible with the writing. So jobs that involve a lot of overtime, or being on call 24 hours a day, are out. Click here for a list of possible jobs for part-time writers, and their pros and cons.

I also hope to provide a forum for discussion and exchanges of ideas and experiences, since I don't have all the answers. A large part of my focus will be jobs and their compatibility with the writing life because that's on my mind right now, since I just graduated with a B.A. and am looking for work. But I'm willing to put up anything that might be of interest to part-time writers, and is on-topic (i.e. pertains to writing.)

I welcome suggestions. Feel free to email me at vivianunger@yahoo.com. Speaking of which, all the "feedback" I have received thus far is spam from people who want links for their crummy vanity-press sites. Let's be clear: no jackass interested in using the web as a vacuum cleaner to suck money from ever-hopeful, overly gullible writers is ever going to get a link from me. So bug off. On the other hand, genuine feedback from non-jackasses would be great. And I will get back to you, though probably not with great speed.

This page resides at http://ptwriter.netfirms.com and is mirrored at http://www.oocities.org/vivianunger/ptwriter.

Updated June 26, 2002