Q: What gives Scrib a restless urge to write?
A: Writing.
Q: I beg your pardon?
A: When he started writing, he went at it as a job of work.
He wrote five days a week and took the weekends off.
But when he took a job, and had to combine writing and work, he found that he couldn’t get enough writing in, before and after work, five days a week, so he wrote on weekends, too. He wrote seven days a week.
Q: When was that not enough?
A: When he got a job where he could write at work, he started writing at work. This mainly gave him more time to help with the child-raising and the household chores.
Q: Has he ever had time to write and money to live on?
A: Several times.
His first year, for example.
Then, when he quit the bank, after Screed was published, and was the houseperson in the home.
A low house payment—and living poor—helped him that time.
Then, when he quit IBM, and was at home.
Inheriting a paid-for house helped him. He mortgaged the house.
It appreciated in
value so much he paid off the home equity loan and had enough money for the
down payment on the house on
Q: He lost that house to the bank.
A: Yes. The boys were both grown up and moved out. He and Brenda moved back into the trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown.
He made it that time by living poor. In the trailer.
Q: In
A: Yes. He lost that job, but didn’t lose the house.
He had a cheap house to move into.
The sale of the
house in
He had a sabbatical year when he got laid off, he had an LDA grant (last-ditch attempt) when Bukowski Never Did This was published, and he cashed in the annuity he had rolled his retirement distribution over into, and his mother left him some money when she died and he lived on that for six months between the custodian job and the handyman job.
Finally, the last job he had, writing training courses for the unemployed, he saved enough to write Notes From Underground and The Above-Ground Review.
So he had years at the house, writing.
Q: Did Brenda work?
A: Yes.
Q: Are you both going to be able to retire?
A: No.
Q: What are you going to do?
A: Keep working.
Q: There isn’t any work.
A: I’ll find something.