For writers nowadays, the author is the product for tangibles and intangibles in addition to the individual's creative, fact-checking, or research work. You're the virtual assistant, and the readers/customers are your intended audience. Since June 17, 1959 I've written at least one book every year or two while working my way through my area's local university. What motivated and inspired me to write almost daily for those decades?The last time I worked full-time in an office setting, back in 1974, my pay was minimum wage, which then was $1.65 an hour. I worked on a weekly newspaper, writing a frequent "Globetrotting Gourmet" column and selling display advertising on the side without commission, all for that $1.65 an hour, which paid my rent and bus fare, food, and any other bills. That's one reason why I became a full-time book author working for myself. The price of rent increased. Back then I had my own version of the 'gig' generation, where one works at home freelancing as an independent contractor in a field of choice. My choice was writing, and the fiction writing thundered with memories of elementary and middle school life story highlights. Before the outsourcing era, the work I did when I found it, had been outsourced to me. And that gave me time to write novels, plays, and scripts.The years of work I'm familiar with are my own, which would be 1959 to 2004. On one job when I was 18, the office manager asked me on a job interview not what job skills I had but he asked, "Do you have a boyfriend?" Another question asked, "I hope you won't get pregnant if I hire you and I'd have to spend money training someone else." He never asked me what I could do on the job or what the job required, and just wanted to know whether I'd stay for years or leave as soon as I found a boyfriend to "pay the bills" as he prattled on at that job interview. That was in the summer of 1959, when I was 17 and had graduated from high school looking for my first job so I could work my way through college and get my teaching credential so I could teach in community colleges (creative writing courses or journalism and business communications). My minors were psychology and anthropology. My favorite subject was anthropology. Nowadays, the biggest worry of many women and men would be "is my job going to be outsourced overseas, so the employer will get to pay fewer dollars to the country of the outsourcing?" As a journalist, there's a lot of outsourcing nowadays. This book reveals all the details and information noteworthy enough to motivate me to make writing books my full-time career for all those decades.
