One of the things that most made me want to pursue publication was that you can write from home. I had a disabled husband who needed care and two small children, when I decided to really buckle down and complete a novel and try to sell it.

OK my dear husband has since passed away and my sweet children have grown up and I still haven’t sold a novel, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can write from home. And I still love that.

Who cares if you get paid for your art? Artists have almost always needed patrons to support them while they created things no one wanted to pay for. What’s so great about writing is not that you make money doing it, obviously. It’s that you can do what you want, and you can do it from home.

God has given me the perfect set-up. I stay with my mother all day. She pays me to take care of her. I’m charging her a sixth of what a nursing home would take, and I love her more than nursing home workers would love her. She is allowed to eat what she wants, when she wants, instead of having to be on someone else’s schedule. So I feel good about taking her money. I feel like she’s getting value for her money.

And me? I have the great good fortune of being allowed to sit home writing with only a few interruptions during the day.

So I should be able to a better job of blogging, I guess. But I’ve been taking sick days the last couple of weeks. Painful, painful dental work, and I threw my back out, too. Lots of pain. Lots and lots of pain. And no pain pills. I’m in agony.

So I had to blog about it, because…we are supposed to write what we know.

Pain. I know pain.

But…I’ve managed to finish a proposal for a new book—a synopsis and the first four chapters—even with the pain. This is the thing about writing fiction: I can’t really get into writing nonfiction or working on blog posts when I’m in pain, but fiction works even in pain. It’s just so much fun that it feels like a distraction instead of feeling like work. And since no one is paying me for my fiction and I don’t have to turn anything in on any particular day, it really isn’t work. It’s all play.

Is there anything in the world that is as much fun as writing?

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