The More Things Change . . .

While reading CAVE OF A THOUSAND TALES today, I came across a quote from a letter Hugh Cave wrote to fellow pulpster Carl Jacobi in late 1932.  Cave complains about having written 32 stories in that year, but at that point he'd been paid for only 19 of them.  He was running out of money, yet publishers owed him over $1500, which of course was a pretty good amount of money in 1932.  I wouldn't turn my nose up at it now.  That got me to thinking about my output.  So far this year I've turned in five novels.  I've been paid for one of them.  Of course, I've gotten some payments for books that I wrote last year, but still, getting paid always lags farther behind than the writer feels like it should.  That's why unless you're a big-name, high-dollar-advance writer, you've always got to have a lot of projects in the pipeline, so that some money will be coming in for something on a semi-regular basis.  It's a nerve-wracking way to make a living . . . but of course, nobody's got a gun to my head forcing me to do it, either.

This was a real-life day, no writing or revisions, etc.