Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

While I have been unsuccessful in locating the original author, there is a piece of advice floating around the internet that I think is worth exploring. According to this gem, we should all have three hobbies. One hobby should generate money, one should be good for the body, and one should be creative. Most days I figure I can’t afford another hobby, either in terms of time or in the actual cash it would require. I suppose if I took up normal hobbies, like knitting, it might be less expensive, but I just don’t see that happening.

t is really easy to figure out how much something costs, determining how much it is worth is considerably harder. These hobbies are no different. For the first time in recorded history, we will actually be making a profit raising goats next year, assuming that nature cooperates with us at all. I can provide receipts for how much this endeavor has cost me, but showing you what it is worth will be much more difficult. Both of my children are dedicated, hard-working people with the ability to solve problems, and it is at least partially because livestock is so very good at causing problems that need to be solved. The time spent with them, the babies delivered, the buyers satisfied, the memories involved, all those things have a value. What about the exercise that I probably wouldn’t have had without them? Or the comfort I’ve taken from them when I needed it? If you’ve had a bad day, nothing will take the sting away faster than a lapful of baby goat, trust me.

Even before it turned an on-paper profit, raising goats counted as my money earning hobby.

Good thing, because raising horses is not really a money-making endeavor. The old joke isn’t far from the truth: “How do you make a small fortune with horses?”, “Simple, you start with a large fortune.”

They aren’t profitable, but they are great exercise, especially if you have more than one. Of course, I could substitute any other blood-pumping hobby here: basketball, soccer, swimming, hiking, you name it, really. The thing is that this is the one I can’t live without, to the point that at an age when taking up knitting might have been a saner choice, I’ve decided to both breed horses and take up jumping. It’s possibly an insane choice, but it works for me.

It’s that last hobby though, that I’ve been struggling with. You see, I’m a writer. That’s what I do, and who I am, but I don’t consider it a hobby. Anything that takes time, quite naturally has to take away from something else you’re doing, unless you’ve found a way to multiply the number of hours in your day. If you have, shoot me an e-mail, I’d love to learn your secret.

I was reluctant to add anything else to my routine, simply because I felt like I would be shorting other things that I valued. Writing is creative enough, right? Well, this bit of advice kept nagging at me, so I finally ran a little experiment, and began using 30-45 minutes at lunch time for art. Seriously, I would have probably wasted this time flitting about the internet anyway, so what did I have to lose?

Strangely, five pounds, and a lot of negative emotion.

The art is interesting enough that I ate less and felt more satisfied, and it lets you express whatever the heck you feel like expressing at the time without any strings attached. Novels are creative, but you can’t just start murdering characters in a romance because you’ve had a crappy day, nor can you let your evil necromancer have a wild fling with a wood elf based on your own mood, it just won’t fly. The other benefit I wasn’t expecting was that my word count increased and my time decreased, I’m guessing because I’d essentially ‘primed the pump’ at lunch.

Just an idea you might want to try.

Cheers,

Michelle