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"Unpublished writer." I like that. Give me a moment to write that down on the list, just below "predicted anomaly" and "jumbo shrimp."

Face it, kids, you're not a writer if everything you've got is paper-clipped together in a stack on the corner of your desk, or trapped somewhere on your hard drive. If your words are not in print somewhere in the public domain, then you are as much a writer as I am a submarine captain. Granted, I wouldn't have been able to deliver this sermon 20 years ago, but this is a different age; anybody can have a blog, or one of those Facebook pages that is fun for about a week. If you can get to a keyboard, you can get published. Maybe more people will be reading the tag on your underwear than your blog, but at least you'll be, in the most literal sense, publishing. Congratulations. Now you're a writer. Wasn't that easy?

Oh, you actually want to get PAID for it. Well, that's a little different story. Kind of a tough row to hoe, that. But I suppose it's not totally out of the question; after all, I get paid for it, and I've never thought of myself as being that special. Let me see if I can remember how that all came to pass, and I'll try to give you some tips.

The first thing that comes to mind is that pay usually comes from doing work. If you want to get paid for writing, you have to regard it as work. Which means actually getting off your butt, or probably more accurately, getting on it, and doing some work. Hey, I already said that, didn't I? Of course I did. See Paragraph 2. Updating your blog once every six weeks is not work. Getting on this website and adding one article every three weeks is not work. Trying to fit in an hour or so for writing on the weekends or after the rest of the household has gone to sleep is not work. I spent 20 years trying to do it that way, and I can count how much money I earned from it on the fingers of no hands. Once I decided that this was going to be my JOB, and started spending a job-like amount of time on it EVERY DAY, I started to get paid for it.

Can't see how you can make that sort of commitment in your life? Well, neither could I, at first. A choice had to be made. I could either accept automotive parts as my true calling, or I could totally destroy any sense of material comfort I had and lose the respect of all but one or two people who really understand me and take a chance. That's how it goes sometimes; you have to decide for yourself if that's how you want to roll. No matter what you do,

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