True love: Georgia and her baby dolls
Every writer dreams of being able to make a living off of writing and, to some extent, I've done that. A very nice living, despite Denmark's 60% income taxes, which allows me to have a hardwood-floor apartment in a trendy neighborhood, to eat well, to raise Georgia in comfort and to buy vintage Thierry Mugler suits on eBay every once in a while.
Of course, I'm not writing precisely what I might otherwise choose to write. I've spent the past week, for example, putting together a magazine in Finnish. I did my portion of the writing in English, of course, and my new Finnish colleagues translated it. Danske Bank recently purchased a bank in Finland, and this magazine will explain to the Finns exactly what they've gotten into. The magazine looks good, at least until my Danish bosses get busy "improving" it. So that's my life, now.
It's actually not my full-time job that exhausts me, or reading "A Day in the Life of an Astronaut" or "Mr. Brown Can Moo - Can You?" over, and over, and over again to an enthusiastic audience. It's the housework, all the housework, one of the disadvantages of being a single parent.
I'm not necessarily in favor of gender division of work, but I'm certainly in favor of SOME division of work, and right now I do it all. I cook and wash the dishes; I sort clothes and oil the door hinges and adjust the bicycle seat; I do the pension planning and fill out the Danish and American tax forms; I carry groceries up and garbage down the 92 stairs to my house and I pick up the toys again, and again and again.
This leaves little time for my own personal writing, so I hope you will excuse the delay in new episodes of Half-Life.
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