How I’m Investing in My Writing Career This Year

I lost my job the first week of January.

Not the way I planned to start 2026, but here we are. There's no dramatic backstory. Budget cuts. Restructuring. The kind of corporate reasoning that sounds clean on a Teams call and lands like a bruise in your inbox.

For a few days, I did what you’re supposed to do. Updated my resume. Reached out to people. Let LinkedIn drain my will to live. Applied for roles that looked promising, then tolerable, then simply available.

Then I opened my author dashboard.

Four books. Four actual, published books that people have read and messaged me about like the characters are people they know. That part still surprises me. And a website domain—ashamara.com—that I've owned for months but never built because I kept telling myself I’d get to it when work slowed down.

Work slowed down.

Those books didn't disappear. The day job did.

I don’t sit with that thought very long before guilt shows up. Because who loses their job and immediately starts thinking about their novel? The responsible move is to panic quietly and apply for jobs. Full stop. Hoard the savings. Send the applications. Be grateful you have skills people will pay for. The writing thing—that's the indulgent part of your life that you earn the right to do after you've done the real work.

Except.

Except I didn’t write those books in some imaginary free time. I wrote them while working full-time. While managing partners. While hitting numbers that had nothing to do with me.

So the question that keeps circling isn’t “Is this realistic?”

It’s “What if I actually invested in this thing I’ve been building like an afterthought?”

Not instead of job searching. I'm not delusional about the mortgage or the health insurance. But alongside it. With the same energy I used to pour into other people’s quarterly goals.

Investing in yourself sounds like something you put on a vision board, not something you do when you're unemployed and checking your bank balance more than you used to. It feels backwards. Maybe that’s why it matters.

So here's what I'm doing.

I'm writing. Non-negotiable calendar blocks. Not “if I have energy after job applications” time. Scheduled work. Deadlines I can’t miss, because that's the only way I've ever been consistent about anything.

I'm building the website I've been stalling on. I’m learning the parts of the business I avoided because I was tired and put them off. Email lists. Reader engagement. The algorithm everyone pretends not to care about.

I’m spending money—uncomfortable when you’re unemployed—but it matters. On editing, cover design that can compete with traditionally published books. Tools that scale.

Every dollar feels heavier right now. I know the statistics about authors and income. I've read them. The fear is real.

But I don’t invest in things I don’t believe in and that includes myself.

I’ll land another role. My experience is solid, and someone will see the value in it.

But when that happens, I won’t be starting my author career from scratch. I’ll have a growing readership. A functioning platform. Systems already in motion.

And if it takes longer than I want it to? Then I'll have spent that time building something no one can restructure out from under me.

January didn’t go according to plan.

Maybe that matters less than I thought.

I’m investing in my writing career this year.
Not someday.
Now.