Dear Reader,

"Three and a Half Good Legs" is part of the Wattpad Paid Stories program.

This is pretty much the writer's dream: earn some money for doing what you love.

I honestly never thought I'd make money off of my writing. Still, I loved it enough to devote hours to it. I sat in my room, sequestered away in my own little world, spilling words onto paper and word document, just because that was what I loved.

A writer's job isn't easy, and it never ends.

I might not be actively writing at any given moment, but I guarantee that my day is still punctuated with potential plot points, and random ideas that I jot down in my phone notes, lest I forget them. Before they're alive on the paper, my characters live in my head. It's a job to give life to characters—you have to make a character believable to an audience, and also relatable. You have to worry about character contradictions and whether or not he or she is a Gary Stu or Mary Sue.

You also problem solve. Sometimes, it takes one hundred times going over something—trying and retrying to fit the pieces of a plot puzzle together—before the solution hits you and you get it right. What if, what if, what if...And then finally!

In the end, you come to care about these characters and this story you're writing because, in all the plotting and dreaming and problem-solving, these characters have become part of you—a part that you're presenting to an audience, entrusting to the critique of a sometimes-harsh world. You want—you hope there will be—people who love them as much as you do.

None of it—not any of it—is easy. But you love it, so you keep going.

We call them our 'works' and they are work.

Yet we do it, for free, because we don't feel right without words coming out of our hands (whether by hand and pencil or by keyboard). We do it, because we have stories inside us that are begging to be told, and we aren't content to let them go untold.

We do it, for free, but there's that little niggling thought in the back of our heads—the dream—that one day, our work might matter to people. That we might be paid for doing the work we love, just like we might get paid for any other job.

The idea of having readers be able to support my stories means so much to me. For calling myself a writer, it's hard to put into words how the possibility to be paid for my work feels. It feels like that—like possibility, a next step, a reward for hard work. It feels like validation; it feels like recognition.

Wattpad is a unique platform, that has offered me numerous opportunities since I joined the site. They're always looking at ways to offer even more opportunities to their authors, and this is another way they're trying to do that.

What does this mean for you?

It means that "Three and a Half Good Legs" will be free up to a certain point, at which time it will cost some money to continue reading. By paying to read further in the story, you're supporting me, as a writer, directly. This means the world to me.

Your support of "Three and a Half Good Legs" within this program is so so appreciated by me, and I hope you are able to continue to enjoy the story in this new format.

-titanically