The thing is, doing what you love and passing it off as work, a career, even—it’s the ultimate scam. The victim is either no one at all (it’s your life) or everyone else (no man is an island), but there’s no question that you’re getting away with something—and not just a sly little trick but a sustained and life-defining con. I write full-time (which is to say, I’m a novelist but also a screenwriter, editor, anthologist, freelancer, and occasional speaker and teacher, as “writing full-time” tends to go), and while I have several reasons to write, some of them even good, I mainly do it to keep the scam going.
I know a lot of writers now, but even
