Payos (sidelocks) were a total failure
Fortunately, not all writing is literature. Besides journalism and legal writing, there are the highly lucrative fields of business and promotional writing.
I’m presently working on a grant application for a dairy company. Potentially, if successful, it could solve all my money problems forever. Of course, I’ve had more than a hundred grand in the bank before, and presently am flat broke. So “forever” is used advisedly here. Still, it’d be great to be loaded again, and this time I’d know better how to make it last, even if I do truncate “would” too often.
Promotional, direct mail writing is allegedly where lots of money can be made, mainly because results are so clearly measurable. Direct mail, for those of you in Rio Linda, means those vile snail and e-spams that everyone (except about 4% of recipients) discards. I’ve been taking a course in it (Michael Masterson, courtesy of AWAI [American Writers and Artists Institute]) but have yet to try actually soliciting clients. On the one hand, money is my favorite. It’s fungible and has a universally agreed-upon purchasing power. On the other, direct mail letters require a lot of research into subject matter in order to write them. Right now, I don’t have the luxury of time to do that kind of research.