Excellent career advice from my father This week, I received some excellent career advice from my father. I received it secondhand, from my brother, two days after my father's funeral. I told my brother I was trying to figure out how to get my writing career working properly, and I was having a really hard time.  People were happy to give me ideas about writing to market, or deadlines, or marketing, and none of them felt right.  None of them felt like me. My brother told me this career advice our father had given him: "Don't look at the best things.  Look at the worst things, and decide if you are willing to live with those." That seemed like excellent advice, so I decided to try it.  I wrote down a list of things I love doing.  Next to each one, I wrote down the worst thing about trying to make money from it.  I marked each worst thing as acceptable or unacceptable. The results were eye-opening. Every single worst thing about trying to make money from writing or art was unacceptable. Every single worst thing about trying to make money from gardening was acceptable. . . . Oh. Clearly I should not be pursuing either writing or art as a career.  I should be pursuing gardening! Okay.  Wow.  That changes a lot. First things first.  I will continue to write and do art, of course.  I do those things because I love them.  But I will let go of my stress and expectation that they should provide a consistent income stream. Instead, I will simply be grateful for anything my fans (that's you :D) choose to give me.  And I will never worry about writing to market, aggressive marketing, or any of that other garbage again.  That stuff has always gotten in the way of my doing the best work I can. For a consistent income stream, I will focus on breeding plants and selling my own varieties.  I think that is work I'll enjoy, and it will make the world a better place, and I was planning to do it for fun anyway.  I think I will primarily focus on drought tolerant perennial edibles that taste delicious and provide abundant food for very little time and effort, because I want to grow those, and I think most people do.  (Grin.)  Happily, there are a lot of species that fit that description.  More about those later! If you enjoy my books, I suspect this is great news.  I suspect this shift in plans will result in more books, because I'll feel more comfortable to play around and do whatever I feel like, which tends to result in more writing and more interesting stories. I've been trying to figure out how to get my career working again for three years.  Now I finally feel like I know what to do. It's wonderful that the person I have to thank is my dad.