I quit smoking thirty-two years ago, when cigarettes were well under a buck a pack—about sixty-five cents, as I recall. Today, here in Jersey, I was surprised to find out that they hover around eight bucks a pack, and in New York, they can cost twelve dollars.
That means each smoke you light up today can cost essentially what an entire pack cost in 1980. You would think that economics alone would bring the tobacco industry to its knees, and in fact, that largely is what’s being done—or at least being attempted, because the majority of that price increase over the years has been from taxes, as opposed to the actual cost of tobacco.
So if you smoke a mere pack a day and gave up the habit, you would stash away more than three grand a year—tax free! And even if you’re not a saver, think what you could do with an extra eight dollars a day. Every day!
Someone once scoffed at the price of my first novel—Grave Departure—which retails for $9.95. “Ten bucks is a lot to pay for a book by an unknown novelist,” he told me as he lit up a cigarette.
Now, I have a pretty good brain, but not a terribly quick one. If it were quicker, I would have done the afore-mentioned calculations and told him that if he gave up smoking for two days, he could afford my novel. If he gave it up for a week, he could afford the top tier of the New York Times Best-Seller List!
Excerpted from Good Writers Block
Ed note: Congrats to Jim for the nomination of his short story, Foxhole, for Book of the Month by Long and the Short Mystery Reviews.