Don't give up the day job
Huffington Post ran an article on The Bizarre Day Jobs of 20 Famous Authors, so of course I sidled over to have a look, hoping that some over-hyped, pompous writer had once been in charge of artificially inseminating llamas or something. However, the reality was both more mundane and more peculiar. I will grant you that oyster piracy (Jack London) is a bizarre way of making a living, but engineer (Dostoyevsky), barrister (John Galsworthy), surgeon (Arthur Conan Doyle)? Some of them are pretty well-known facts, too. Disappointing. Maybe what we actually need is a list of jobs that seem peculiarly fitting for particular authors, though perhaps it would be as well to restrict it to the dead just to be on the safe side of libel...
The thing about day jobs, bizarre or otherwise, is that your average writer gets masses of inspiration from them. Office politics. Legal jargon. The way llamas stamp their feet when you get too close. Although it's sometimes a pain trying to fit writing around work and everything else with a claim on your day (like reading Huffington Post articles or catching up with 3 days' worth of Twitter-feed) I do think it keeps you more in contact with (at least a portion of) the outside world.
Speaking of which, that bookaday thing is still going, but it's getting a bit specific now (I guess there's only so many open questions about reading you can come up with). It's now at We Love This Book and as usual I've come to it late. I'm not going to go through the lot, but I will make the following comments: Do people buy books for the cover (4th)? Surely every reader gets sparked off by a different book or type of book (21st). Lots of books make me question everything, that's how I know they were good (29th). And if I had a cup of tea for every time I've been likened to Arthur Dent (14th)... I'd have several cups of tea.