eddvick

Carolyn See
Random House / 2002

---

Not so much a how-to book, though there's a lot of practical advice. This is more of a why-to book. From chapter 18, the last chapter:

If you're not a bona fide "bestseller", money comes in a variety of ways. You can teach "creative writing" (if some institution will hire you), you can do the occasional book review, you can give inspirational speeches (if anyone will consent to listen), and you can sell books out of the trunk of your car. All that is fun. But money for the serious - and even frivolous - writer flows to you basically in three ways: by applying for grants, doing magazine pieces, and having some fun with the tax man. You can go on with your day job - T. S. Eliot was a banker, William Carlos Williams was a doctor, etc. - or you can go looking for "a big advance" with your big-advance truffle pig, but only a true maniac would expect to make money from writing short stories or literary novels.

There are a lot of assumptions in this paragraph, not the least the recognition of myself as a 'maniac'. But grants? If I didn't have a full time job that would be something interesting to follow up on. I'm writing grants for the adoption agency for which I work, and plan to write them for our SF conference Foolscap if we succeed in getting our 501(c)3.