I have been a full-time writer for almost a year now. When we started Starling Fitness, I jumped from being a part-time-just-for-fun writer to a full-time writer. I wrote in the mornings before I went to work. I wrote in the car during my lunch hour. I wrote in the evenings after I got home from work. I thought about writing all the time, even when I was working on HTML programming or folding papers at my “real” job.

Then I got laid off in April. Mike thought it was great. He told me that I should just write full-time. He was planning on re-launching the Gadgets Page and I could write for that and the Quotations Weblog. I could be a full-time writer without the “real” job on the side. I didn’t listen to him. I insisted that I get another job. I don’t even think I really heard him. I was so focused on getting another job. I was obsessed with proving that I was a good employee: the kind that didn’t deserve to be laid off.

I got a new job within a week. It was a great job that I still can’t tell you anything about. The people there were wonderful to work with. I was so grateful to find such a nice, quiet place to work. They let me do my work without micro-managing my every move. They were pleased with my work and were thankful to have me there. That just made me feel like a complete jerk when I decided that I had to quit. Almost a month ago, I turned in my notice and last Friday was my last day there. The job that I never could talk about almost went completely unmentioned here.

Now, I’m a full-time writer. Now, I’m just a writer. I’m not a writer, but I program HTML for a company that I can’t talk about. I’m not a writer, but I’m also a secretary at an engineering firm that doesn’t care about or use my abilities. I’m just a writer, and it’s bloody scary.

It’s even more scary than you know because I’ve done this before and it didn’t work out. In 1997, I quit working at the insurance firm that I was with to be a writer. I had finished my first book and I was going to do some writing on the Quotations Page. You can see those early entries on the Quotations Weblog. If I had kept writing there, I would have had the oldest weblog on the Internet, but I let fear get the best of me. I became a real estate agent instead of following my dreams because I was too scared of achieving my dreams.

Not this time. This time I’m in a much better position. I’m already writing full-time here at Pick Me!, Starling Fitness, The Quotations Weblog, and The Gadgets Page. Soon we will be starting another weblog that is particularly interesting to me and I can’t wait to get working on it. This time I kept my day job until my writing was working out so well that I had no choice but to quit.

Now, if I could just stop feeling like a flake for quitting…