Ditching the side hustle

Seems like everywhere you turn, people are talking about their side hustle. Whether its starting baking business, trying to become an influencer, driving for a ride share, and yes, even writing books... it seems like whenever you have a hobby or an activity that you enjoy doing, someone is always asking you (or telling you how) you can turn a profit. Make a little side cash.

Just. Stop.

I'm not kidding.

When did it become a necessity to monetize your joy? Because for me, doing that almost ruined my love for writing. Marketing, especially self-marketing, doesn't come easy for me. But if you want to sell your books you need to invest a lot of time, energy, and money to make it happen.

You need to have a social media presence, and see if you can get your book picked up by an influencer. You need to post about it on what seems like a thousand different platforms that change every ten days or so. You need to book yourself into book fairs, interviews, craft fairs, conventions. Some people thrive doing that. And if you're one of them, that's awesome. I'm happy for you (really) and I hope you're successful.

But I find it freaking exhausting. And it sucks the life and the energy right out of you. At least, that's what happened to me. Trying to market my books was like a second full time job that I tried to squeeze in between my day job, my family, and my horse. Plus it is nice to see my friends every now and again.

Plus, it left me no time to write anything new and my brain was so wrung out, there were no creative ideas anywhere to be found.

That's one reason I created Red Fox Writer. I'd done a whole bunch of "branding" for myself. Who I wanted to be as a writer, and it came to represent that attempted monetization of my joy. I stopped liking it, and I stopped caring about it. (Side note, as I write this the menu options I have in this plat form include a button to monetize this blog. Nope. Not doing it.)

And since I let go of the side hustle, or at least what was left of it, I've wanted to write again. This blog post is an example. But I have novel drafts and short story drafts on my computer that I haven't touched in two years, but now I'm getting the itch to work on them again because I feel free to just write what I want, and I'm not worried about whether I'll get it published or how I should be positioning this on social media.

I just get to write. And have fun. Find my joy again.

If you're stuck in the same rut that I was, think about ditching the side hustle, too. It might be the best thing ever for your creativity.