Every year, this question pops up. Every time I start a draft. This year, I’m determined to finish it.

Short answer: writing, but making money doing it. Which I guess is where the “job” part comes in.

Or like, scratch that, I am technically making money doing it right now. Perhaps that’s the problem, though. Maybe with a dream job like “writer,” the “job” part distorts what success looks like, keeps moving back a goal post that is hardly available to anyone at all, anyway.

I want to make enough money writing that it doesn’t feel like a waste of fuck that’s some bullshit though!!

Time doesn’t need monetary value to be worthwhile.

It’d be nice, though. Just sayin’. To make a lot of money.

Not too much! This is where it gets weird. I don’t want anything even close to some JK Rowling shit; that’s too much happening. Overstimulation just stepping outside, being that bitch. I’d say I want as much as the author of the Hellboy comics makes, or maybe somewhere just under the Station Elevan supastar, but it’s like–

It’s like this.

Money would be rad. Not because of good reasons, more because this is all already so fucked up, and money needs to be rad if you have kids, if you have a home, and you want all that to be ok.

Despite this, the part of being a writer as my dream job that clicks the most for me always has been/always will be fandom.

Not a big, terrible one. A niche one. Thank god, because I doubt my queer alien trauma recovery journeys would ever become the next Harry Potter, even if that was the goal.

I want a little crew of freaks. I want a thriving ao3 community. I want weird little fandom facts and OOC depictions of my side characters and discussions on how OOC they are, and I want my books to occasionally be spotted in the checkout impulse-buy aisle at drug stores.

That’s actually an old one. For a long time, I viewed true literary success to be the presence of my dime-store paperback novel in Rite Aid. Fuck it, you know, it still is.

It still is.

The first time I held a copy of something I wrote in print, it was cool, you know? It was… kind of exciting. But oddly sad, too. Bizarrely nostalgic, like I was looking at someone I’d loved who’d long since died. Writerly friends discuss their own experiences with this often, and it usually includes tears, hugging that book or whatever, taking pictures, and cheeks hurting from salt and hard smiles.

This didn’t happen to me. Not then.

Yet the first time someone drew fanart for something I had written, I lost my shit.

It wasn’t any kind of big thing. Actually, just a bizarre Sherlock Holmes RP on Tumblr. I joined it last, and there were no more characters to play. I essentially skimmed through my collected stories and landed on him, Wiggins! Wiggins and the Irregulars. Whatever. Let’s do that.

And, like most things I do for fun and don’t put extra care into doing right, it did far more fucking fabulously than anything else I’d been trying to do at that time.

Immediately, the fuckboy I invented to be this character was a favorite. His cohorts, perhaps even more so. People loved him. I had the most followers out of any other RP players, the most asks to respond to, and pretty quickly, fanart and fanfiction for this thing that I’d by-and-large pulled out my ass.

I remember it so clearly. The first time my writing visibly, and without me requesting or expecting it, inspired other art.

I fucking wept.

So yeah. My dream job is writer. I already have it, great. So, like all shit in this consumerist hellscape, the line moves back.

Like all shit that’s growing, the line moves back as I grow forward.

My dream job is to be a writer, check. Make a good amount of money, not checked. Have a small, devoted community making art and talking passionately about my work.

That one. That one that one that one.

Aaaaand to have at least one weird paperback make the rounds at Rite Aid.

Yeah.