This weekend I made pickles. I love pickles and decided that it might be fun to make some. Besides, there a restaurant in Boston that has the BEST pickles and I wanted to try and replicate their recipe. This may sound gross, but it’s SO good – the pickles actually taste like cinnamon. I can’t even explain it. So my pickles are a variation on a recipe I found on the Internet with some cinnamon sticks thrown in for good measure. I can’t wait to eat them!!

Which brings me to hobbies. When I decided to make the pickles I had to buy everything involved – the mason jars, the pickling salt, the vinegar and spices and even those darn cinnamon sticks. $40 later I was ready to make pickles. 8 pickles. That’s $5 a pickle, so they better be good! I may even give Vlasic a run for their money and become the queen of pickles one day. We’ll see.

I never viewed writing as a hobby. The day I started my first novel I also started researching agents. Three months later I had an agent and a month after that the book was finished and sold. Yet so many people think writing is a “hobby,” like a quaint activity that we do between loads of laundry.

Does something cease to be a hobby once you get paid for it? If someone bought my pickles, would I be a professional pickle seller?

What about you, what hobbies do you have? Are they something you’d like to parlay into a payday someday?