A Writer's Wages 1981-1984
I want this site to be a repository not only of my writing but available as an historical record of a writer's practice during this period. This is why I had to be honest and republish nearly everything I could find rather than just select what I thought most worthy. When a free-lance writer, I kept financial record of my earning for income tax reporting. Reproduced here, these books show precisely what I earned as a writer, for what and from whom. (Note that the entries Dufflets and David Mirvish Books were other income that thankfully I was able to give up.)
When you compare my bibliography to my financial records, you can see the decisions I had to make. Take 1983 and 1984 when I began to write for Vanguard as well as Parachute. I would have preferred to continue writing only for Parachute (and Parachute editor Chantal Pontbriand asked me to do precisely that), but Vanguard paid better. I needed to write for both. Parachute paid $50 for a review, Vanguard $75--but my reviews in Parachute regularly were over 2000 words and those in Vanguard around 1100. Similarly Parachute paid $200 for an article and Vanguard $350--but my articles for Parachute might be 5000 - 10,000 words (my 1983 article on General Idea was 18,000 words) while those for Vanguard were 3500 - 4200 words.