Writing is my second job. I wish it was my first, but in an increasingly saturated book market it sometimes feels like it’s difficult to make your mark, let alone make a living at this business called writing. Most of your favourite authors, particularly in the very small market of m/m romance, work day jobs and do their writing in their few spare hours.

And that’s okay. That’s actually not me bitching, because I know how lucky I am to even have a day job (even though at times I hate it with the intensity of a thousand burning suns) and I will always be forever grateful, and a little bit surprised, that I even got published in the first place. Sure, the fantasy is always there: how amazing would it be if I could earn enough from writing to spend every day doing it?

The fantasy will stay a fantasy for a while at least, because hello mortgage.

But being a writer, either as a first of a second job, is a strange sort of thing. It’s great, obviously, because you don’t have to wear pants or a bra. You probably should though, or at least know where your dressing gown is at all times, because otherwise it gets awkward for the parcel delivery guy. Lesson learned.

But writing is a strange job because, I suspect like all creative processes, most people don’t realise just how much work goes into it. How many hours, sometimes, for what seems to be very little output.

At the moment I’m definitely in one of my creative lulls. This isn’t unusual for me. I’ve got a book off waiting for edits, but no other current deadlines. It turns out I need deadlines to motivate me. There are, of course, six hundred other WIPs waiting for me to get the hell to work on them, but I’m just not feeling it at the moment. Some of that is because I finished night work yesterday and my body clock is totally out of whack, but a lot of it is just, for me, the natural ebb and flow of productivity. Eventually it’ll swing back around and I’ll write like the wind, but for the moment I’m not getting much of anything done at all. (Glances guiltily in co-writer’s direction.)

For those people in my life outside my fellow writers–friends mostly, since my family gave up years ago–I come across as an incredibly antisocial sort of person, or a workaholic, or both.

Do I want to go out tonight after work?

No, I have to go home and write.

And they look at me a little pityingly, like I’m depriving myself of fun just to go and chain myself to the keyboard for a few hours. Except that as much as I enjoy catching up with people for laughs and drinks, after more than a few hours I start to get itchy feet, and a desperate need to go home and write. Because writing is a job, and it’s also damn frustrating at times, but it’s also my idea of fun. When it’s no longer any fun at all, I’ll probably stop, but for the moment I like doing this. Okay, I hate the parts where I feel like I’m beating my head against a wall and taking hours just to write one stupid paragraph that will probably get cut in edits anyway, but the satisfaction of the finished product has always so far been worth the effort getting there.

At GRL last year, after all the talks were done for the day and we still had a few hours before one of the parties, I looked up briefly from my computer to discover that the three other writers I was sharing a room with were doing the exact same thing as me: furiously writing. Because that’s what we do. That’s our fun. Okay, usually there aren’t quite so many mini vodka bottles littering the place (thanks, Katey Hawthorne!) but that’s how most of the writers I know party: silently, with Google Docs open.

Oh, and the best part? Apart from a shelf full of books with your name on them? Getting emails from people who want to thank you for something that you wrote. Maybe it changed their life, or maybe it just made them giggle snort. Because writing might be a solitary business, but a book isn’t. A book is created to be shared.