I was watching a rerun of the 2 Broke Girls pilot last night on TV. Overall, the show is kind of meh, but in the show they have a few common themes to where I am in life right now. They are poor and they are trying to start their own business. Well at one point in the show one of the girls says to the other that they can start their business in about a year if they both have two jobs and they start saving. What I heard from this is… should I get a second job?
I have been being pulled monetarily a lot of ways lately. My roommate has a job, so now I don’t have to pay for everything that I was last year this way, but I still have a lot of things going on. My car has been breaking down more often, I’m trying to save up for a new car, I’m trying to get my bank account in a better place since draining it, I’m trying to pay off the credit card that I’ve run up, I’m trying to pay off student loans, trying to pay off a loan I took out to pay for teeth work, and all the while trying to survive my day-to-day life.
I started searching for jobs that may work and saw a few. I also figured out that if I got about 25 hours a week from a second job at a measly $8/hour (usually for part-time work you get minimum wage), I could make about $800 a month. I can take that down to $700 after taxes and I gotta say this isn’t terrible. All this money would be in addition to my normal life so all of it could be used for paying off bills instead of paying for rent and utilities. I could be generous and say another $100 is spent on gas for the new job and then I remain at $600 a month. With that I’d likely split it between the car savings, the arcade savings, and paying of loans faster.
There are a ton of problems with me getting a part time job… I already have a job for one and it pays pretty decently and I get my insurance through them so that one needs to stick around. My hours are generally around 8 to 5:30 ish, they change every day. I have a game night on Tuesday so I can’t really do anything that night and I only have my daughter every other weekend so those weekends that I have her are also off limits.
This leaves me realistically with 6 to 11 on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and every other weekend. I could probably also pull Sunday after 6 as well, but the problem there is most places aren’t even open on Sundays after 6 so I’m not counting that. I am a hemophiliac with problem ankles and a problem elbow so I’d prefer not to have a job that keeps me on my feet too much, which is pretty much every evening part-time gig.
Even so, I was checking out bartending jobs as I feel the experience would help me out a lot, but I think that week nights are probably the hardest time to find those jobs. Some people actually do it full time and there are limited slots in the week. Everyplace is looking for weekends. I also think an arcade type place would be pretty good but there are few of those places around. To my surprise, I was able to find a job that would fit me really well, but it is in the Dells about 45 minutes to an hour away which would cost a lot in gas and time and am just unsure if it would be worth it.
Which, realistically, would leave me in retail or fast food somewhere. I’m not returning to fast food, and honestly I’m not overly fond of the idea about retail either so I’m not entirely sure what to do.
There is one option that I may need to consider, and that is writing. In the midst of my searching for part-time jobs that fit my very strict requirements I think of my writing that has essentially been abandoned at this point. The thing about my book is that I very much think it will sell… maybe not top 10 best seller, but it would do all right.
I have a lot of confidence in my first idea for a novel. It is gripping, on a subject matter I think people would want to read about, and original in style. And I also feel that if I sold the first, the second would be a lot easier to write so I think I could make a career of it if I could just get past the first… and the first could fund an arcade which could also build a career of my own.
The problem is the subject matter of the first. It is about me. It is about a subject of mine that I don’t talk about ever. I hear all the time that writing about your own issues is cathartic. But I don’t know, to me it is just hard. I never talk to friends or family about this. It is the unspeakable me. But it is one that is worth money.
So maybe my writing should be my part time job. This is difficult. On the surface it seems easy that OK, now instead of going out 6-10 every night to a job I just sit at my computer writing. But I also have a roommate who I’d like to hang out with, chores around the house to do, and limited time. I think if I were to do this, I’d need to talk to my roommate and come up with a schedule that both of us can deal with because honestly I need to be left alone during this.
If I could get 2 hours on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then another 2 every other Friday and 4 on every other Saturday and Sunday; I think I could get a lot of good work done. The novel length that I am looking at is going to be around 100,000 words. The average professional writer writes 1,000 words an hour. If I say that I only do 500 per hour, I could get 100,000 words done after 200 hours. This seems like a lot but is doable. With my above time frames available I will on average do on average 11 hours a week on writing which would take 18 weeks, or 4 months about.
This is a big proposition. My first thought is I better hope that I type more than 500 words an hour and that I can come up with a higher than 11 hour per week average. But 4 months will suffice if I can actually stick with it.
In case you were wondering, I am sitting at 1154 words with this post and it took me about an hour to write…