Surviving the economy forces a writer to follow her dream

After college, when I married and had a daughter, I chose to quit my job and stay home with her. We live near Springfield, Ill., in a rural part of the country where housing prices and the costs of living are low, and my husband's income was enough to support our family.

But in the weakened economy, our situation changed. Gas and food prices rose and cut into our budget. My husband's income, which was based on commission, dropped. Afraid of continuing a career in the declining construction industry, he chose to return to school and switch careers. Thankfully, he made the right decision. Within a month of finishing his degree, he found a new job.

I didn't.

In a time when we badly needed two incomes, we could not make that happen.

I am a writer. But no company likes to see that on a résumé.

What I do have on my résumé is a series of part-time jobs and temporary gigs that writers take to make ends meet: administrative assistant, library assistant, graduate assistant.

You name it; I assisted in it.

The replies to my applications came back, one after another, politely thanking me for my interest but declining an interview. A person like me -- a writer with a history of temporary jobs, a mother with a seven-year break from the full-time work force -- isn't the first choice for an open position.

How have I survived? The usual. I've dipped into savings. I've stripped our budget to the bare essentials and come up with creative ways to save a few pennies: We've turned down the thermostat and cranked up the electric blankets, dropped our land line and switched to cellular phones, washed the dog myself and stopped taking her to the groomer.

Not finding that office job forced me to make financial sacrifices. But more significantly, it forced me to focus on my dream: my writing career. If it doesn't happen now, it is never going to happen.

This year, with a lot of time on my hands and a lot of bills to pay, I found the courage to call myself a professional writer. I created a blog on writing after talking about starting one for the past two years. I began writing for other online companies, which resulted in not only the first money I have ever earned by writing, but also the discovery of a network of writers and readers who follow my work and provide feedback.

When the economy turns around, I will have struggled through the lean times of launching a career, and I will be poised to take advantage of a new time of prosperity. Would I be so hopeful if I were working in an office job, continuing in the same patterns as I have thus far? No, because instead of working toward my future, toward my dreams, I would still be working only toward my next paycheck.