Reinventing Mike Lake by R.W. Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

who supported my passion for writing.  In freelance work, there could be long lulls between employment and then there was the amount of time I’d have to spend building up a resume so I could realistically have a chance at the big jobs, which were few and far between.
                  Early on in our relationship I took jobs that paid one and two cents per word.  I also did all the filler jobs as I called them.  Basically, I just provided content page after content page for new websites so they seem established when they first hit the web.  This was mind-numbing work, but it eventually began to pay off with stories in magazines and newspapers.  Still, without my wife supporting me, there is no way I would have been able to have the time to build a decent resume.  It was a catch-22.  I had to do all of the work, which equaled hours and hours of time, but little pay, just hoping for the pot of gold at the end of the crap rainbow.  There’s no way I could have put the time in doing that on my own.  I would have had to support myself in another way, or I would have starved.  Or just ate a lot more meals that my mommy cooked. 
                  Still, after six or seven years of writing, if you can call it that, I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for the love of writing, or the love of money.  I can remember many occasions when I had the idea to sit down and write something for myself – a short story, a novel, a screenplay idea, and I would think to myself, I’m not getting paid for this, why am I writing this?  It’s just the way my brain had become, and maybe still is, wired.  When one gets used to getting paid for something for so long it’s hard to do it “just for fun.”  I often wondered if athletes, musicians, and even healthcare professionals have similar thoughts.  Time after time I would get something going, but never had the desire to do go through with it.
                  It was a conversation with my dad that helped changed my view on my struggling with writing.  My dad and I weren’t much for deep conversation, but the handful of times I really sought his advice he always came through.  He doesn’t waste words, and thinks carefully before he talks.  Many people say multiple things in hopes of hitting the target.  When my dad spoke, he almost always hits the bull’s eye on the first shot.
                  It was about ten months after she died, and he and I were talking on my deck.  He heard my whole speech about how I was having a hard time finding the desire to do writing I wasn’t being paid for.
                  “You’ll write when you want to.  When something moves you enough to write, you will,” he said.
                  “Also son, all that money stuff you say doesn’t make sense, at least to me.”
                  “Why”?
                  “Because, if you were to write a movie, or a script, or a novel, or whatever, and it were to sell, you would be making a whole lot more money than you’ve ever made writing about dead presidents.  Hell, you’d have all the dead presidents you’d ever need,” laughing at his own joke that I suspect he didn’t intend to make until it came out.  But he was right.
                  I guess I ultimately knew that if I were to ever sell something it would most likely be for a decent chance of money, but it wasn’t that part of what he had said that I focused on.  I’d write when I was ready, he had said to me.  There was no need to force anything, in other words.  I have thought about his words often since that day – all the way up to the dead presidents joke - and they have steered me straight when I began to have anxiety about what I was, and what I wasn’t, accomplishing in the writing world.  There, on the deck of my Uncle Howard’s beach house, was when I decided it was time to start writing again.  Without major