: Should I write my novel? I am a guy whose passion has always been fiction writing but in college I decided to go into software engineering because my parents were in a bind and they needed

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Mercy, yes. If the story is burning to be told, yes. If you enjoy the craft of writing, yes. If you love reading over what you've written, yes. If you like the world you've created and the people you've put in it, yes.

"Later" you'll still have a job and your daughter will be demanding in a different way and life will always, always suck up your available time like chaos and goldfish. There will never be a perfect "later" when you can sit down and just work on this. So do it now. And do it later. And do it in little bits all in between.

Yes, yes, yes. Write your novel.

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Yes.

I didn't even have to read your question (but I did). The answer is yes.

Write 25K words in half a year. That's perfectly respectable. I work full-time, and often 2-3 hours a week is optimistic for me. Maybe you'll crawl along, maybe you won't be fully satisfied with your work. Hell, maybe you'll end up tossing everything you've written before your daughter turned [arbitrary age of independence].

It doesn't matter. You still write. As long as you keep writing, you're making progress. It might be frustratingly slow, but that's because writing is hard.

Community-wise, we don't like very short answers. They seem curt and unhelpful. I wrote out a full answer, but at the end of the day, the one-word answer is the one you're gonna get: yes, write.

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Probably, the real answer is as simple (complicated?) as Charles Bukowski's, So You Wanna Be A Writer
allpoetry.com/So-You-Want-To-Be-A-Writer
Here's an excerpt:

So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.

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