I’ve decided not to do an Arisia 2012 roundup. It was a great con, but not par­tic­u­larly lit­erary, and I’ve already tweeted most of the coolest cos­tumes and party shots. I did have one great panel on the future of science-fiction, which felt a lot like sit­ting around with a bunch of old friends and kib­itzing about some­thing we all knew and loved (the best con panels are always that way), but I’ll let that stand. I think it’s C.S. Lewis who advises you not to cling to tightly to the things that bring you joy.

A few people have asked me to blog about how I make full-time writing work finan­cially, and I think that’s a really inter­esting topic. I won’t go into details on spe­cific dollar amounts, but I think what I am doing could be scaled to fit anyone’s desired lifestyle. There are two things I want to point out before I get started:

- I have been a full time writer for only 9 months now. That’s not a long enough time to gauge whether or not this is working or will work long term.

- I am not com­fort­able with my cur­rent lifestyle. I accept it because I want to be a full-time writer really badly. I live in a run-down building in a some­what unsafe neigh­bor­hood. My apart­ment is tiny. The building is noisy and reeks of mar­i­juana. Kids occa­sion­ally deal in the stair­wells. The hot water is inter­mit­tent and so is the ele­vator. My walls throb with my down­stairs neighbor’s reggae well into the wee hours. I am con­vinced that the one reason I’m safe (so far) is because my whole bearing screams COP from 300 paces. People, totally unbidden by me, rou­tinely call me “sir” or “officer.” While that’s tech­ni­cally true (Coast Guard are fed­eral police), I sure as hell don’t have juris­dic­tion in Flat­bush, Brooklyn.

Now, I know this lifestyle is far, far better than a lot of folks out there. I have my own apart­ment. I have enough to eat. I have med­ical care. The vast majority of the world would look at that as the height of luxury. I try to be cog­nizant of that and con­stantly remind myself how lucky I am. But I’ll admit that I can’t help but com­pare my cur­rent life to how I used to live: in a well-appointed condo in one of DC’s hipper neigh­bor­hoods, with enough money to do what­ever I wanted, when­ever I wanted, without a second thought.

But it’s absolutely worth it.

I’ve never been so happy in my life. The only thing that I am unhappy with is how much money I am making. Con­trast that with my life before, when I was fine with money, and unhappy with every­thing else. I can figure out money, now that all the hard parts of the equa­tion have fallen into place.

Here’s how it’s possible:

Strate­gies:

- I have com­pletely down­sized my life. I spend roughly a quarter of what I used to (I’ve cal­cu­lated this) in a given year. I live in this neigh­bor­hood because of the price and the prox­imity of cheap shop­ping and a cheap gym. I don’t own a car. I have sold most of my belong­ings: no TV, no stereo. I don’t even own a real bed. I sleep on a jury-rigged futon, which is slowly destroying my back. When I go to cons, I always have a room­mate, and fre­quently stay at hotels some dis­tance from the actual con hotel, which have cheaper rates. I go every­where by bus, even though it some­times mean I’ve got a 9 hour ride awaiting me to get to con when it would be 3 hours by train or plane.

- I rig­or­ously track expen­di­tures. We’re talking down to the penny. I have a spread­sheet that goes by the week. Every dime I spend goes on there. I know exactly what my out­lays are by the day.

- I saved money before I decided to go on this grand adven­ture. I was a GS-14 on the fed­eral pay scale when I was still tra­di­tion­ally employed. The mer­ce­nary busi­ness (while I was in it) was obscenely well paid. I was single, had no chil­dren, and had a car that was paid for. I socked a lot of that money away and added to it when I went full-time by prac­ti­cally selling every­thing I owned. I am cur­rently living on that nest egg. It’s enough for 3 years with NO income. But I have SOME income, so I might be able to go even longer. The goal here is to give myself enough time for the writing career to take off and become finan­cially self-supporting. If the money runs out after that 3–5 years, then it’s time to admit defeat and get a job (or raise my hand and go on full-time active duty, which is what I’ll prob­ably do).

- I have a budget, broken down by the week, based on the nest-egg I just described, and I stick to it. In fact, I usu­ally beat it by a good margin each week. When­ever I beat it, that money goes into a vir­tual “reserve” (not an actual sep­a­rate account) on which I draw for large busi­ness expenses (like hotel and trans­porta­tion fees for going to con­ven­tions). The reserve is also the cushion against sudden,  unan­tic­i­pated expenses (my com­puter dies and I need a new one, etc …)

Income:

- The reserve. This is my saving grace. My com­mis­sion in the reserve allows me to work part-time (one weekend a month, plus two weeks a year) and earn an income (how muchI make is pub­li­cally avail­able, I put on O3 in a couple of weeks or so) that isn’t enough to live on, but just about covers my rent for the year. More impor­tantly? I have full cov­erage dental and med­ical insur­ance, the full-time artist’s holy grail, for a nom­inal cost. I always say that being in the reserve is tailor made for full-time artists, and I think everyone should con­sider joining. Not only does it have all those prac­tical advan­tages, but it also gets me up out of my chair, allows me to con­tribute to the common good, and gives me stuff to write about. When I’m on active duty (mobi­lized), I make a full time salary that’s actu­ally pretty good. I got off duty recently after I was acti­vated to aug­ment staff and respond to Hur­ri­cane Irene, and that stint of full-time work gave my bank account a much-needed boost.

- Sub-rights. So far, I have sold sub-rights for the SHADOW OPS series in the Czech Republic and the UK. We have an audio­book deal. SF Book Club is doing a spe­cial hard­cover edi­tion. A Hol­ly­wood agency has picked up the man­u­script and is shop­ping it around. All of these things trickle in (or could trickle in) money (never enough and never quickly), and helps to extend that 3-year breaking point out into the future. Hope­fully there will be more sub-rights deals coming. It helps that I have the greatest agent in the world all over that.

- Odd jobs. After years of being a fairly high-powered gov­ern­ment offi­cial, it’s tough on my ego to scrape for odd jobs, but pride isn’t the path to suc­cess. When work is offered, I take it. I have friends in pub­lishing who occa­sion­ally throw me work, ranging from low-end office tasks to more creative/challenging stuff. The work is infre­quent and low-paying, but I always say “yes, thank you” when it comes my way. Most folks now know I was a “fighting extra” in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. That was gru­eling, hor­ribly under­paid work that resulted in my get­ting phys­i­cally injured daily for a week. The cool-factor of being in a Batman movie wasn’t remotely worth it. But I did it, and I asked the casting agency to keep me on file now that I was the­atri­cally fight trained in case they ever wanted to use me again. The day may come when I can turn down free­lance money, but today is not that day.

NOTE: I do NOT list roy­al­ties here. I have no expec­ta­tion of the SHADOW OPS series ever earning out its advance. It would be great if it hap­pened, but I do not plan on it. I con­sider the advance (and any sub-rights advances) to be the only money I’ll ever earn on SHADOW OPS. This is a.) real­istic and b.) moti­vates me to pro­duce new fic­tion that I can hope­fully sell for another advance.

And that’s how I do it. We’ll see if it’s sus­tain­able for the long haul. I realize that my method may not work for everyone, but I hope that people con­sid­ering full-time writing can get some ideas here. People always tell you that writing is a finan­cially fraught life, but folks rarely explain the down-in-the-weeds details of how they sur­vive. I guess this is the blog post I would have liked to have read a few years back, when I was plan­ning out how I’d make a go of it if I ever got a book deal.