How would you spend it?

I barely looked at my computer, let alone my feeds, all weekend and was trying to catch up earlier this morning. One of my favourite weekly series is done by the Dear Author blog. Each week they ask an author about their first book sale. Actually it's not always about their first book, sometimes the second sale was the bigger struggle. Or they switched genres and discovered that writing a good romance novel wasn't quite as easy at they thought it was.

So this morning I paused to read about Pam Rosenthal's first romance sale. What really caught my attention wasn't so much her struggle to sell a romance novel but how she spent her advance (or at least part of it).

One thing I've learned thanks to the internet is that that writing books isn't an easy living. Writers don't just sit around and eat bon-bons all day. (I know, shocking! Dreams dashed!) Book advances are not the magic solution to being able to sit around and do nothing but write. Sure we read about the big six figure advances but they are really much more rare than we think they are. Most book advances are far more modest.

But I like to think that most authors splurge a teeny-tiny bit when they sell their books. Maybe it's a nice dinner. Or a new pair of shoes. Or even a kitchen sink.

So let's pretend that you sold a book and got a modest advance. It's nothing that would see you going to Paris for a month or buying that dream car. It's just enough for you make a small splurge.

How would you spend it?

Contributing Editor Sassymonkey also blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.