We continue to barely function

Samuel Johnson (of the dictionary) spent a lot of his life trying to avoid debtor's prison. He's one of the most highly regarded English writers in history but while he lived and worked he struggled to survive. Such is life.

What he would do to avoid debtor's prison is that he would ask for subscriptions to books he hadn't written yet. He frequently failed to finish those books by the time the money ran out, but he got there eventually.

He funded an annotated collection of the complete works of Shakespeare this way.

Shakespeare did make money during his life, but that was less because he wrote plays that it was because he was a partner in his company. In those days authors had no rights to their work – the company owned the plays.

He did have some success as a poet, when the plague had closed London's theatres. He used long-form narrative poems to shill for a patron, and he had those poems printed and they sold well, and he may have made money from that although I'm not sure we can confirm that.

During his life Shakespeare became famous enough that a printer who'd stumbled upon a couple of his sonnets threw them in a book with a few more he pulled out of Love's Labours Lost and some others by random other poets and sold the book as entirely Shakespeares.

The problem here was less that he'd printed Shakespeare's work without his permission and without compensating him. The problem was that he'd put his name on other work – inferior work.

Shakespeare earned a living by owning a business, and begging for patronage – that was how writers survived in his time. By the time Samuel Johnson was working, his right to own his writing was protected by the Statute of Anne. He had the exclusive right to sell and profit from his work, but still had to scrape and scrounge to get by.

It feels like we, as a society, have always wanted to have writing but have really never figured out how to pay the people who give it to us.

Reading about Samuel Johnson while doing research for History is Sexy is one of the things that that made me start thinking about writing some serialised fiction. I've talked enough here about my current circumstances but given I've been a professional fiction writer for over a decade, it seemed like writing some fiction and asking people to pay for it wasn't too strange as an idea.

I still dithered over it for a couple of months, I still dismissed it frequently as probably a bad idea, I still worried that I was asking too much and that no one would want it, no one would be willing to pay.

Aside from my own discomfort it is frustrating to me that, with all our societal advancement, we're reverting back to a system that requires artists to go out, hat in hand, in order to cover they're bills. I don't want to honk my own ass here, but I'm more than a decade into my career. I've published four books, had audio dramas produced by the BBC – I've done reasonably well. But the industry as a whole is so precarious, the money on offer is so little, that I'm still here, after one bad year, unable to pay the rent.

I would infinitely prefer that those corporations would pay artists properly, or that we had a strong, non-punitive, welfare system that actually covered living expenses. But we live in this dumbest of timelines and so sometimes we have to look for support where we can find it.

I believe in community responsibility. I believe that society works best when we support each other. But in a global economy, in a vast, urbanised system, there's only so far we can take that as individuals. We all know this isn't ideal, we all know there should be a better way to do this than supporting however many patreons and newsletters we can afford to.

We do it, I think, in the hope that this is a temporary state of affairs. That one day things will shift and it will become easier to support ourselves. But in the meantime, this is what we've got.

And I think it's beautiful how many people are willing to contribute to someone's work in this way. I love doing it myself, when I can afford to. I just don't like that it's necessary. I don't like that it's necessary for me currently.

It's one thing to believe in direct support for artists, and another to ask for it.

Especially right now.

There are knock on effects to the decline of any industry, if nothing is done to support to those who are pushed out of it. They look for jobs in other industries, and push people out of that industry in turn. They lose spending power and become less able to support other businesses. They lose the ability to support other people.

This is the thing that I come back to again and again. When there is insufficient institutional help we are also robbed of the ability to help others.

We are born to be part of a community, we are connected to everyone else whether we like it or not, and when we live in a system that lionises individualism that instinct for connection becomes agonising.

When we are forced daily to confront a suffering that we can do nothing to alleviate, when that is coming on top of our own survival becoming so hard to achieve – this is corrosive to the soul.

Everyone I know is currently navigating life under the constant burden of our helplessness. Everyone I know is wrestling with this baffling reality that we have no recourse to prevent a genocide everyone can see on their phones every day.

I don't know what to do. No one knows what to do.

What I do know is that all power held only by the consent of the people, and that too often power relies on our forgetting that fact. Every so often, though, power crosses a line and the rest of us remember that we're really in charge. The slow journey from monarchy to democracy is the story of a series of bad kings who inspired the people to claw back a little bit of control for themselves.

The current moment is showing us that we don't really live in a democracy. The current moment is showing us that it is time, again, to try and claw back a little bit of control for ourselves.

We have to help each other for long enough to build a system where everyone gets the help that need, and within which we will have more capacity to help each other. We have to build solidarity and bake it in.

We're in this together, whether we like it or not.