Don't quit your day job!

[philreed]

I work full-time in the game industry and am comfortable. I have a staff position with STeve Jackson Games (30 hours a week) and spend another 30-40 hours a week on my personal projects and freelancing.

 

[Ashy]

I work as an IT management professional for a fortune 500 company during the day, as a full-time parent of two young children in the evenings, as a graduate student (at least for a little while), and as an author when I can. Of course, maybe that is why I'm not very prolific. Throw in the weekly tueday night game and a chronic addiction to NWN and scripting development and its easy to see why the grass is so high. Mix in shabbat observance and... well, you get the point.

It is hard to imagine anyone could write for a full-time living, especially if they had kids.

Well, I don't freelance full time, but I am in IT full time and have four kids. Still, I make time for my freelancing and Art Director business. I do not watch T.V., only sleep three or four hours a night (jusk ask Ed - grin) and drink boatloads of coffee. So, it can be done, with sacrifices....

And NO, not *those* kind of sacrifices.....

 

[jgbrowning]

Suzi and I work part-time writing/publishing gaming material. It's a side effort by us that allows us to spend time together, learn a lot about different subjects, and write off our hobby as a business expense.

We could turn Expeditious Retreat Press into a fully functioning RPG publishing house, but that's quite a lot of additional work that we don't want to do right now. We're enjoying it just being us, even if that means we don't put out a lot of material.

joe b.

 

[meatpopsicl3]

I work full time as a technical professional for a f500 company. I've been running 3ednd.com for several years now, and am just starting out in the ePublishing business. I think the reason why I've been able to work full-time _and_ do ePublishing at the same time, is that I've gotten a lot of help:

All I'm doing is the writing and coordination
My wife Karen is doing the layout and design
Our friends in our gaming group have volunteered to do editing and playtesting
I've gotten a handful of volunteers from the web for more playtesting
I'm paying artists to do internal artwork and the cover art

All in all, there's probably 200+ hours/week of activities going on that are going into our first publication (about 100 pages)...

I was putting in ~20 hours/week (mostly on weekends) doing the initial writing.

Now I'm puting in about ~8 hours/week (again, mostly on weekends) just doing the coordination of everyone else.

Hope that's helpful.

 

[cleavthorn]

It is tough!

Aside from drawing, developing and writing part-time, I work 3 days a week at a liquor store to make sure that our bills coincide with the money coming in several months after I do a project.

My wife works full time as well, and we have a daughter and one on the way.

Oh! I do manage to get a little more sleep than Ashy, however!

 

[Bloodstone Press]

I work full time as a supervisor at a medical lab. The insurence is good (although I never need it, which is good too), and it keeps the bills paid. Not having kids or TV leaves me a lot of time in the evenings and weekends to work on material.