Whoring Myself Again - Andrew Crofts

          I hadn't heard my son coming into the office as I typed away at some self-promotional piece of blogging or tweeting or whatever was the social media flavour of that day. He only needed to stand behind me for a moment to grasp what I was doing, being a world-class reader of screens.
          "Whoring yourself again?" he enquired cheerfully before ambling off to stare into the fridge for a while.
          The bluntness of his comic timing made me laugh, as it often does, then I got thinking. "Whoring yourself again" is pretty much the perfect definition of freelance life. I've spent time with a great many people who have at some stage been involved in prostitution, either voluntarily or enforced. You sell your body or you sell your brain - either way you run the risk of ending up selling your soul.
Most writers hate promoting themselves, always hoping that publishers or agents or critics or fans will do it for them. But in our hearts we all know that if we wait for other people to sing our praises and rush out to buy our wares we are going to starve to death, so we hitch up our skirts and return to the kerbside of life. 





Comments

Lee said…
You don't have to starve to death. You can earn your living at something else at the same time -- and frankly, I think literature is better off for it. There are too many books written anyway.
JO said…
I'm beside you on the kerbside, though my blue wintery knees don't seem to be helping much. (Maybe that's why I travel in the winter!)
Jan Needle said…
two quotes for lee. 'happy is the man who can make a living out of his hobby' and 'anyone who writes anything except for money is a fool.' (that may be a misquote, but we know what the feller meant}.

discuss
Kathleen Jones said…
Yep!! we're all mercenaries.... But happy to prostitute myself in the service of literature (note small L) - no one else wants my body anyway!!
Dennis Hamley said…
You're probably right, Lee, there are too many books. We just have to believe ours aren't part of the superfluity. But if what Andrew is doing counts as whoring, I think I'd better start doing it myself.
Jan Needle said…
dennis, i'll start the bidding. three and six enough?
Lee said…
Hi Dennis, I'm all in favour of whoring. The only thing is, nobody will have me...

;-)

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