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A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I'M READING / LISTENING TO / LOOKING AT.

Feb 07, 2012

» Lev Grossman on why he keeps his day job

Necessity, stupid. From his FAQ:

Your novels sell pretty well. Why do you still work at Time?

That’s a good question. I’ve talked about this before, a couple of times. Bottom line is, I do make a pretty good living from my books. I look at some other writers who are in comparable places in their careers and think, gorram it, they write fiction full time, why don’t I? But I can’t. If I’d made certain decisions earlier in my life, and not made a few others, I could. But as it is I have a lot of overhead. For reasons that don’t bear going into, I have to live in New York, and that’s incredibly expensive. Also a lot of people depend on the money from the Magicians books, not just me. And it’s not like working for Time is a crap job. It’s a great job. It doesn’t pay as much as The Magicians pays, but it pays enough.

Emphasis mine. (Lynda Barry: “The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”) I’m reading Grossman’s The Magicians right now and really enjoying it.