34 Ways to Know That You’ve Made it as a Writer of Fiction

1. When the amount of money you make from your writing is equivalent to the amount you pay for the alcohol that you’re drinking.

2. The stories you write are better than the ones you read.

3. A stranger comes up to you at a party and asks if you are Andy Dick, and you say, “No, I am not Andy Dick.” And the stranger says, “Well, then, fuck off.”

4. There are stipulations in your contract that account for nuisances such as noise disturbances and the manipulations of spacetime relationships that form while under the influence of paragraph-less mania, and you are not concentrating on or concerned with creating images that “pop.”

5. A Leonard Cohen record is playing on your record player, and you are putting the finishing touches on the last sentence of the last draft of the first part of a miniseries about a man who has lost the ability to use curse words, and you think, “Well, this, this is really something now, isn’t it?” while draining the last of your coffee and cracking all of your toes at the same time.

6. People are reading your stories at places other than nativeapp.toutiao.com.

7. You still do your clothes shopping at The Goodwill and other thrift stores, but feel as if you probably could afford to shop at fancier…