People always tell you that writing is a financially fraught life, but folks rarely explain the down-in-the-weeds details of how they survive. I guess this is the blog post I would have liked to have read a few years back, when I was planning out how I’d make a go of it if I ever got a book deal.
Since I’m interested in writing (maybe not for a living anytime soon, but eventually, closer to retirement), stories like this one (where Myke Cole talks about how he’s budgeting to follow his dream of writing) are very helpful. By comparison you get some self-pubbed authors (who I will no longer link to) who talk on-and-on about the joy of Amazon self-publishing strategies. While that may work for those people, when they have a publishing history that goes back twenty-six years (and starts in traditionally published books), it’s very hard to attribute their success solely to the self-pub revolution they’re going on about. And for that reason, I really appreciate these more realistic presentations of what it takes to make a living as a writer.
Jeff C. Hines also posted enlightening numbers recently, showing that over his nine year career in writing, he’s made less than $20,000 for six out of the last nine years. He opines “I’m at the point in my writing career where, based on the past four years, I’d give serious consideration to quitting the day job … if I had a reasonable source of health insurance for my family. Since I don’t, I’m still not in a position where I can write full time.” The point about life insurance is a reasonable one. For myself, living in the San Francisco Bay Area where the average Silicon Valley salary tops $100,000 means I have a number of expenses that aren’t present in other parts of the country, or rather, I have the same expenses, but at much higher rates. (For instance, I pay close to $30K per year in rent, the average is around $27K per year. There’s just no way I could live off Jeff Hine’s writing income without giving up all sorts of luxuries, like food.) Focus put together a fantastic infographic that shows how a fictional employee’s $92K salary in Silicon Valley had the same buying power as a $59K salary in San Diego.
I expect to have retirement income later in life, so I expect to be more in Myke Cole’s position than Mr Hine’s. (And that’s another scary point, if you’re making less than $30,000 on average, what do you do for retirement?)
There are several reasons why you might want to enable manual provisioning of your Avaya IP Phones:
When troubleshooting QOS issues (including dropped calls, one way talk path, etc.) on an Avaya CS1000, sometimes it’s helpful to look at all of the alarms (even the unnacceptable or warning alarms) on a per-call basis. This gives you an idea of when there are problems in an entire zone vs individual users within the zone, or zone-wide and ongoing versus intermittant and individualized alarming.
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