"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

money, and a fair amount of it. I added McDonald's, so that technically I had three
jobs at the same time, but while I was sure as hell employed, I wasn't making enough
money to feed a dieting cockroach.

My mother (who also wanted me out of the house sometime in her lifetime) was
working at a local hospital. She ran into some of the nursing students there, and came
home from work one day and told me I ought to go to nursing school. It was cheap, it
was local, and the uniforms were cute. (They were also polyester and hot as hell, but
they were, indeed, cute.)
So I went to the community college, boned up on algebra, and took the test. I passed
easily, and found myself at the very top of what was for some people a two year
waiting list. And with about that much forethought, I started into two years of hell as
a nursing student, where I discovered that the uniforms might have been cute but the
work wasn't. I discovered more than that, though. I discovered the enormous variety
of humanity, and life and death, and pain, and hope, and love and hate and fear.
Ten years of nursing following that put me in touch with the basic themes of my life.
That people matter. That love and our time are all we have to offer each other that
means anything. That death is a mean bastard, and that he comes for all of us. That
life is worth living, no matter how painful or scary it sometimes gets. That magic is
real.
That I hate the assholes who gravitate to administration.

Yeah, well ... not all themes are uplifting. I had to get out of nursing. The patients and
the actual work were wonderful, but the paperwork was bullshit, and I don't know
where hospitals dig up the creatures who end up as administrators and head nurses,
but I swear, they need to bury them back where they found them and hire humans for
the job.

I'd been writing all along. Short stories, poems, twenty-page тАЬI'm going to write a
novel nowтАЭ false starts. I finally got serious. Writing was how I was going to make
my way out of the increasingly bitter world of nursing. And to make a long story a
little shorter, I sold my first fantasy novel, Fire in the Mist. I sold a couple more. And
I quit nursing. I quit too soon, and I've had to run like hell to keep in one place most
of the time since then. But I did it. I'm out of nursing. I work for myself (and I really
am about the only person I willingly take orders from). And writing, for all that it's
harder than nursing ever was, is also more joyous, and more fun, and a lot less
dangerous. And the major themes of my life have become the major themes of my
writing, too тАУ so it has all worked out pretty well.
HOLLY LISLE
 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 18

And everything I ever did prepared me better than college ever could have for what I
do today. Like I said, this has been a long, hard road, but skipping college was one of
the best dumb mistakes I ever made.




HOLLY LISLE
 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 19