What If This Is As Good As It Gets: A Taxonomy Of Writerly Luck
reflections from the bottom of the nonexistent midlist
So of course I was already thinking about my friend Lyta’s post from the other day1 and then my twice-yearly royalty statement arrived. It occurred to me that the low but not-negative number there — two years after publishing my second book, it was enough money to take my wife to dinner, maybe a couple times — represented considerable good luck on my part.2
Lyta’s post prompted me to to think about the gulf between how much the number on that check made me feel like a loser who is living in an unsustainable delusion vs. how much good luck it actually represented, and also about how sustainable is a situation where I’m one of the lucky ones, and about the inherent and artificial limits on the improvability of that situation. And which limits are inherent, which artificial.
“Lucky,” I’ve said. Relative to the general situation. So that raises the question “How lucky can you be?” We need an account of the tiers of luckiness. Here’s my attempt.