We celebrated our company’s Christmas party last night at a local restaurant. My wife and I went early so we could grab something quick to eat before everyone else arrived. As we waited for our meals to be served I thought about the next chapter of my life.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly due to the fact that I have been interviewing many different people for the feature I’m writing for the next issue of the magazine. I have come to the realization that, with no journalism degree or even a degree in English, I am going to have to create my own career if I hope to make a living at writing. For me, that means a number of things.

Number one, I have to become a better writer. Though I feel there is more to it, I subscribe to Malcolm Galdwell’s tenet of 10,000 hours to achieve excellence in what you do. I currently have about 4,000 hours under my belt as a writer (if you want to credit me with 1 hour of writing for every 2 hours of reading I’ve done, I’m well over 10,000 hours, but I don’t think it works that way). Using the 10,000 hour rule I have about six years to go before I can begin to make a living as a writer.

I’m becoming much better at recognizing areas I need to shore up. For example, listening to eight-plus hours of interviews brought me to the realization that I’m pretty lousy at interviewing people. Despite what I thought were two pretty good Q&A’s recently, there are a lot of things that I do poorly when attempting to get people to open up about what they do.

Number two, my family and I still have to eat during those seven-and-a-half years, so I’ll need to find another means of making a living while I improve my craft and my portfolio. Computer programming has always come easy to me (I wrote a “blow up the Death Star” type game on my TI-99/4 when I was in junior high – wish I still had it), so I’ll more than likely go that route.

Number three, I am going to have to figure out a way to create a vehicle for my writing. People who actually do hold journalism and/or English degrees find it difficult to find paying work in this current environment of disappearing newspapers and magazines. It will be damn near impossible for me, unless I play by a different set of rules. Once I begin in the fall of 2015, give or take a season or two, I will spend as much of my time on creating opportunities to write for pay as I will on the actual writing. This, combined with my willingness to work hard at it, will probably be my only advantages.

After I discussed these three points with Clair, they were all brought home in a stark manner. Our waitress dropped by the table to see how we were doing and to ask if our company was hiring. Turns out she has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri.

Lastly, as I read back over the first draft of this blog, I realize that an English or grammar class somewhere along the way wouldn’t be such a bad idea.