Writing is Detestable, and You’ll Never Make Any Money At It

—excerpted from Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life, by Alexis Paige

Every so often I forget that the life I want is already mine. When I was eight, my younger brother and I left the Sonoran Desert in winter for mysterious reasons and Eastern climes, wearing only faded tees and worn corduroy, for it was still the ’70s somewhere in 1983. Our destination was Ye-Olde New England, which would become the damp, wooly kingdom of my late childhood and adolescence. My parents h...