Great news! . . . not only am I once again unemployed, but school starts next week, meaning that I will finally be home alone while not copyediting anyone else's book. The problem with this scenario is that I won't be getting paid, but unemployment is worth it, at least temporarily.

I really cannot speak too highly for unemployment. Although careers do bring you salaries and power and give you someone to talk to at coffee break, they take up an awful lot of time. But I would not have written a thing if I didn't have all these empty hours to fill.

Of course I second-guess my position all the time, particularly when I realize how very little money I make. When that happens, the declarations of John Fowles can be helpful. These are some bits from his "I Write, Therefore I Am," one of the essays collected in Wormholes. I find them comforting, partly because Fowles is far more of a hard-ass than I am. He sticks to his guns, whereas I flutter about wondering if I've misunderstood what the writing life is all about.

"I had been deliberately living in the wilderness; that is, doing work I could never really love, precisely because I was afraid that I might fall in love with my work and then forever afterwards be one of those sad, faded myriads among the intelligentsia who have always had vague literary ambitions but have never quite made it."

"I am surrounded by people who have not chosen themselves . . . but who have let themselves be chosen--by money, by status symbols, by jobs--and I don't know which are sadder, those who know this or those who don't. This is why I feel isolated from most people--just isolated, most of the time. Occasionally content to be so."

"Money makes me happy to the extent that it brings me more time to write. But it also brings me proportionately sharper doubts about my ability to write; existentialist doubts about whether I have really earned the freedom to write."

"Writing has always been with me a semireligious occupation, by which I certainly don't mean that I regard it with pious awe, but rather that I can't regard it simply as a craft, a job. I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill, and experience; with something from outside myself."

"Writing is active, and the kind of writing I have always admired, and shall always want to achieve, makes reading active too--the book reads the reader, as radar reads the unknown. And the unknown ones, the readers, feel this."