Ideally, yes. I'd love it to be job and be able to give it the time and attention it needs, but that would be on top of a full time job plus my duties as a husband and father. It's just hard to find the available free time.

I could see it being a hobby in my retirement.

I like writing science fiction/fantasy type stuff.

I would definitely enjoy working as an author. I've recently begun writing as a hobby and find so much satisfaction in it. I've been a fantasy reader for a long time and would start there, but would also dabble in horror.

I have been an author for about 15 years. In that time I have published 8 novels, edited three short story anthologies, and won one award. It still doesn’t pay enough to be a full-time job. But I think it is very rare for writing to pay enough to be full-time job. I attend one or two literary festivals per year (pre-Covid) and at least 90% of the authors attending have another job as well. The joke in the community is that the difference between literary writers and genre writers is that the second job for literary writers is teacher/college professor and genre writers have all kinds of different second jobs.

But, having said that, being an author is still a lot of fun. If you’re at all a social person the festivals can be great.

Originally I wanted to be illustrator or an author. I always loved reading. I've tried writing books and comics since fourth grade. School tried to kill my love of both and succeeded in killing my desire to write for years so I focused on drawing. However, I grew tired of creating characters and beings with no world or narrative to inhabit. So for last year or so I've been actively trying to seriously write a book. I do it on the side as opposed to it being my main career which pays me well. I personally dont like the idea of doing it as my main job because I want to write and create what I want. Doing it for a living I would no doubt be forced to write things I dont care about to keep food on the table and have a stable living. Pay attention to what is selling and all that. I feel making it a "job" would kill my love for it. Plus it's less pressure doing it as a hobby.

I've started writing down all my ideas in a note app and have two years worth of ideas and various chapters. I've written and rewritten things a ton. It's difficult. With drawing I could track my progress easier with writing it's a bit of a toss up. It's like trying to find my way in the dark at times. I have my friends read it and bounce it off them. It helps that they write as well. Self doubt is one of my biggest impediments. I swing between fuck it do it to are you sure you wanna do that? You go to the writing reddit and it's full of self doubt as well so at least I have company. I've given up trying to write what I think will most appeal to others and focus on writing something I would want to read. After awhile the best advice comes down to read some books and just shut up and write. So that's what I've been doing.

At this point I have an idea of the main chunks of story and where I wanna go settled. Sometimes the words come out easy other times it's like pulling teeth. But I've always had the urge to create something all the time. So I keep at it. The genre I want to write is a combination of horror, lovecraft, sci fi, and shounen anime tropes.

Once it's written I would like to illustrate it myself because I can see the world I'm trying to write in my head and I can draw a bit so hopefully one day it will come together. At the moment I'm just focused on not giving up.

Hi there! This sub is for discussion around published literature and industry news. Your post would be more suitable to an r/writing related community which are dedicated to these sorts of topics. Thank you!

I like the idea of writing a book, but I don't know if I could ever write a book. Well, maybe I could see myself writing non-fiction. Either a textbook for the subject I teach or a collection of essays if I ever do research again

It's not really a job when nobody's asking you to do it is it? It's one of those things that just start out as an optimistic hobby that you dare to hope pays off one day.