Bombs Away, Pussycat!
A disheveled guide to my first two years freelancing
Mary Kitt-Neel
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Mary Kitt-Neel
License Notes
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Cover Photograph © 2010 Maurice FitzGerald
This is a brief guide, based solely on my own experiences, to what it’s like the first couple of years as a freelance writer. I don’t pretend that my life is in any way representative, but I wanted to share some of what has and hasn’t worked for me. I hope you’ll be entertained, and maybe pick up a bit of information that’s useful to you, whatever path you pursue in life.
6 Things you have to do to be a Working Writer
I've been more or less self-employed since 2004. There have been times when I've been completely broke - as in having used up even the spare change between the couch cushions - and other times I've done OK, and no, a graph of income versus time would not show a continuous upward path. Here is how I've survived as a self-employed person. I'm a writer, but this applies to however you want to be self-employed.
1. Define success for you. The definition I've used as a writer is, if I can pay the bills with money I've made writing, I'm a successful writer.
2. Don't think of your "day job" as a sign of failure. Life is freakin' expensive. My "day job" has evolved as my career has. At first, I worked for a newspaper and delivered papers on weekends while I blogged and wrote on the side. I picked up a little (a very little) money from ads on my blog, and started picking up freelance writing gigs.
One year my goal was to give up my newspaper job, which I did. Losing the income was a shock, but I survived. The next year, my goal was to give up my Saturday newspaper delivery job, and I did. Again, there was somewhat of an acclimation period while I worked hard to make up that income.
Eventually, my day job came to be writing web content for others, using a client base I'd built up through about a year and a half of 7-day-a-week, ass-busting work. I still have that day job, but I recently gave up a client who was (in my opinion) taking undue advantage of me. So far I'm surviving while I use the time I would have spent writing for that client writing this blog and publishing my e-books.
My eventual goal is to be able to give up my "day job" writing web content for others and make my living off my e-books. Who knows? It could take a while, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
3. Don't be afraid of being poor. This was a tough one for me. I have a master's degree in engineering, and when I worked as an engineer, I made good money. Problem was, I hated engineering, I couldn't stand the people I worked with, and I had serious moral reservations about the work that I did (for a defense contractor). It wasn't easy giving up that money. But you know what? It is amazing what you can do without. I haven't had television for about 18 months. I cancelled my satellite TV account when I could no longer afford it. I haven't missed it at all. I get Netflix, and that provides more than enough entertainment options for me. I do not waste food now. The only clothing I don't buy secondhand is underwear and socks. And I am happier and more well-adjusted than I have ever been in my life.
4. Sometimes you gotta ask for help. When I was blogging before, I regularly appealed to readers to donate to my blog. And there were some real angels out there who did so. And I can say with the utmost honesty that the people who would occasionally spare $5 meant every bit as much to me as the ones who could afford to be more generous. There are times today when I still have to ask for help. And people do it. And during the times when I've been more flush than usual, I have helped people out too. Because it's the right thing to do when you've benefited from other people's generosity.
5. Be a ball-breaker when you have to. There are people out there who will send you all kinds of work and then not pay you for it. In the summer of 2007 I did about $1,200 worth of work for a magazine (now deservedly out of business) and didn't receive a dime for it. I have a copy of the magazine (that I bought myself at a local bookstore) that shows that I did all that work, and that's all I have to show for it.
If you're freelancing, and your clients are slow in paying, and your bills are due, sometimes you gotta ask them to pay up. I can't tell you how hard that is for someone like me to do. But I learned how. You have to learn to play the game. Like when there's a message in your inbox asking for another 3,500 words within a couple of days. Sometimes you have to say, "I'll get to it soon as I finish this work for a client who's already paid me," and that's enough to get them to pay up.
Other times you have to flat out tell them: "I can't do it until you bring your account up to date." Sometimes you have to cut a client off. It's hard, but if you're good, you have that leverage, and if you don't abuse it, you can use it to get your cash flow going again when clients are slow to pay.
6. Build up a community of people in the same boat. If you visit my blog, have a look at my blogroll. John Birmingham is a very successful writer in Australia, and he knows what it's like to be where I am, and he's given me all kinds of moral support when times have been tough. And Graeme Rose (also on my blogroll) writes scores for indie films and knows what it's like to struggle. Having friends who understand is pure gold and will keep you going when you think nothing can.
I guess this is all just my way of saying that yes, succeeding on your own is hard, and no, I wouldn't go back to working for a corporation for twice what I was making as an engineer. The benefits of being my own boss are worth far more to me than the cash in the bank ever was.
5 ways to deal when the day goes to hell in a handbasket
If you've been self-employed for any length of time, you know that there are some people who, no matter how much evidence they have to the contrary, think that you have somehow found a way to sit around on your ass all day while money comes in.
These are the people who have no problem demanding that you interrupt your day to deal with them. You gotta learn to avoid these people, but if it's one of those days when the stars are aligned against you, and everything turns into a very rude word with the prefix "cluster-" you need to know how to deal and get on with life. Here are 5 ways that work for me.
1. Step away from the computer. For at least an hour. Of course that will be when someone will send you The Most Important Email EVER and will be put out with you for not being there to respond immediately. Screw them.
2. Listen to other people's crap for awhile. After spending an hour talking to a longtime friend, I have come to the conclusion that I may, in fact, be the most sane person in that particular circle of people. It felt good to find that out.
3. Three words: pounding handheld showerhead.
4. Turn the phone OFF. Voicemail is your friend.
5. Repeat to yourself, as if addressing one of those people who needs you to do something and do it right now or else the very future of civilization could be at stake: "I'll get to it when I'm good and ready." And you know what? You will.
Writers, artists, independent spirits: they want you to THINK you're lazy
One of the biggest neuroses I've carried over from the world of being a wage slave to being a freelancer is that I have to somehow prove to everyone that I'm not just some lazy git, and somehow up till recently, I thought this meant I had to get up at 5:30 or 6 and get to work, the way I did when I had a "real" job.
This is profoundly stupid.
One of the biggest perks of being self-employed as a writer is that I can do it whenever, and pretty much wherever I want. It is only within the last few months that I've accepted that it's OK if I wake up at 2 a.m. bursting with ideas, and start writing. I can go back to sleep when I'm tired.
The fact is, at some point, someone somewhere decided that "work hours" were roughly 8 to 5, and much of the world accepts this unquestioningly, even when it goes squarely against productivity.
In my own case, the stupidity of being a writer while keeping the hours I kept as an engineer dawned on me over the course of this summer, by far the hottest and most brutal in the 24 years that I have lived where I live now, which encompasses almost my entire adult life.
Why was I getting up, sweating and miserable in 100 degree heat that my A/C system couldn't keep up with and forcing myself to work when it was damn near impossible?
Around June I figured out that I could get just as much work done at night when the heat wasn't nearly as oppressive. And if I needed a cheeseburger and Diet Coke at 3 a.m., guess what? Even in the little town in which I live, there are numerous drive-thrus open 24 hours that are happy to take my few bucks no matter what time of the day or night I go there.
One of the greatest freedoms of working independently is being able to set my own schedule. So why was I so reluctant to do so?
Probably because of being raised to get up early and go to school and then, upon reaching adulthood, being bombarded with the received wisdom that I have to get up early to go to work.
Whose idea was this in the first place?
According to several sources, the combination of the Protestant work ethic and the Industrial Revolution proved powerful enough make billions of us accept, without question, that those daytime hours were working hours, and the sooner we accepted that, the better.
There really is a point to this post, and it is this: if you're a writer, musician, independent freelancer, or otherwise your own boss, remind yourself at regular intervals why you chose to do this in the first place. Then ask yourself if you're actually enjoying any of those perks. God knows, if you're like most of us, you're not doing it for the money.
So what are you doing it for?
If one of those reasons is to make your own way and to work at your own pace, when you, specifically, are at your most productive, then make sure you aren't imprisoning yourself in your old work habits - which are probably the very ones that made you want to go solo in the first place.
Taking yourself too seriously: the bane of, well, everyone
I used to work at a fairly highly skilled, fairly highly paid job where I once spent almost half a day listening to a couple of senior engineers have an utterly serious debate over whether it was OK for me to use the word "analysis" in a report I had written, or whether I had to replace all instances of the word with "assessment."
At the time, I knew on some level that this was all kinds of fucked up. It took me another decade before I finally realized that I had wasted far more time in a career for which I was constitutionally unsuited than I did getting the degree that allowed me that career in the first place.
I quit, and I have never for one microsecond regretted it. I only regret that it took me that long to admit that 1) the emperor had no clothes and 2) he had a supremely unattractive body besides.
The thing is, self-importance can work its way into any line of work, and God knows that writing is no different. I mean, ARE there bigger assholes than writers who are overly convinced of their importance? I don't think there are.
So if you plan to succeed as a writer, you have to let go of the idea that you're somehow special. But this has many benefits.
For one thing, understanding that you occasionally write pure crap is very liberating. I can't tell you how many times I've been presented with a job where I have to write, say, a 500-word review of a movie that I have not seen, do not plan to see, and that has not, in fact, been released yet (Yeah. In case you didn't know, most online movie reviews are totally made up.).
Since there's nothing like a complete lack of information about a topic to give you writer's block, I just embrace that lack of information instead. I tell myself, "Mary, I want you to write 500 words of the most unabashed drivel you can come up with about this movie." And I'm always able to do it. Why? Because I know not to take myself too seriously.
And besides, if you take yourself too seriously, nobody can stand to be around you, or else they only hang out with you to top up on stuff they can use to make fun of you behind your back.
So get out there and write, but don't go into it with the idea that you're going to change the world. You might change a sliver of one person's world for a short period of time (which is no small feat, alas!), but yeah, you're not Jesus, and you're not Ghandi, and you're not Siddhārtha Gautama, and you're certainly not Oprah.
It's kind of good not to have all that on your shoulders, though, come to think of it.
3 productivity tips for writers and other slackers
One of the greatest things about being a freelance writer is the lack of regular business hours. But at some point, you gotta knuckle down and get some work done. Here are three of the things that have helped me keep both myself and my clients reasonably happy most of the time.
1. Don't pretend you're a morning person if you're not. At one point, before pruning my client list in mid-2009, I could get on the internet at any hour of the day or night knowing that it was regular business hours for at least one of them, because they were located all over the place. So there was no real point in creating 8 to 5 "office hours." And even if your client is in the same time zone as you, it probably doesn't matter when you get the work done as long as you meet the deadline. Use the hours that are most productive for you.
2. Accept that you will waste time. And I'm not talking about checking email, returning SMS messages, etc. I'm talking about watching that "Squidbillies" video your kid sends you when he's supposed to be applying for that job he's been talking about. I'm talking about LOLcats and Fark and YouTube. Don't try to half-assedly watch a video up in a little viewer while you're also writing about Investment Savings Accounts for that London blogger. Write the damn article, then fully indulge your inner slacker for a few minutes.
3. If you're going to be on the road (and not driving), assuming you can work on your laptop in the car without vomiting, use that time to do all that menial crap you put off, like organizing all those documents into folders, deleting old emails, and running your virus scanner.
Why bother trying? Here's why.
All right, so the past week's entries have been rather pissy, I admit. There are things about being a self-employed writer that suck, but the fact is, there are things about it that I wouldn't trade for anything. I don't make a lot of money from selling my books, and my day job of writing web copy isn't exactly a goldmine, but the non-monetary perks are pretty great.
For one thing, my schedule is pretty much my own. If I'm awake and stoked at 2 a.m., I can knock off some work right then, and it usually won't matter if I sleep late the next day.
We have oppressively hot summers where I live, but mid-September through November are usually beautiful, so I can work sitting out on the front porch or in the back yard on the swing next to the fire pit. That makes a nice “office.”
I like that it is a simple and direct way of earning my keep. I write books, and people buy them (or don't). I have had jobs in the past where I have wondered if anyone, anywhere obtained anything at all of value from the work that I did, and it felt as if I were perpetuating a fraud at times.
No commute. Enough said.
If someone steals one of my Tabs from the fridge, they know they're gonna get caught, unlike sneaky office thieves in past jobs.
My boss is neurotic and insecure and sometimes cranky, but I can usually get her to give me a few hours off if I need to regroup for awhile.
Freelancer Client Ultimate Smackdown!
Though my goal is to someday earn my keep solely through the writing that I want to do, it's pretty clear that clients are going to be a part of my life for the foreseeable future. Here's a little about what I've learned from dealing with clients for the past few years.
1. Trust no one up front. If you've done your assigned job and it turns out they have a bunch of other stuff they'd like you to do because one of the other writers left or can't write, or whatever, make them pay you for the work you've done before you write one more word for them. Sad to say, there are plenty of nice, slick publications that regularly don't pay freelancers, knowing they can stiff a whole new crop of them for the next issue.
2. Start with maturity, but abandon it when necessary. I once worked for a client in Pakistan who sent me a fixed number of assignments every week and paid me on the dot every Friday. Then one day he sent me an email full of complaints. Problem was, he was complaining about work that he had assigned to someone else. I tried pointing this out. He didn't believe me. I sent him a list of the assignments he'd sent me, and the work I'd sent him in return. I could not make him understand that I couldn't “fix” the bungled work because it wasn't my work. Eventually it ended up in one of those “You're fired!” “Ha! You can't fire me because I quit!” situations. We handled it with utmost maturity. About three weeks later, there was an email in my inbox from him with the Subject line: “You there?” It looked very humble, but I deleted it without reading it. Sometimes you just don't have time for their crap.
3. If you have to write stuff that goes against your fundamental moral beliefs, you'll rapidly grow to despise yourself. Now, I've had to write a lot of crap. I've had to extol the virtues of health drinks, seaweed facial wraps, you name it. But I also had a client request what can only be called heavily biased political propaganda that I totally disagreed with. Breaking up with an otherwise good client is hard to do, but I simply could not write what he was asking me to and look myself in the mirror.
4. Remind yourself when you sit down to write something for a client: “This is what I do. This is my profession.” And give them great content, to the best of your ability. That way, when things don't work out with some clients, you'll have others who are probably waiting with a backlog of stuff they can send your way to make up for the work you've lost.
There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want - Calvin and Hobbes
Did I mention that most freelancers have to work Saturdays? And Sundays too. But I can work in my PJs if I want to, so it's cool. Anyway, here are some of the topics I have to work on this weekend.
Storage sheds
Locksmiths
No Panty-line Panties
Lindsay Lohan
Something called “Box Butler” (and I'm not entirely sure I want to know what that is)
With luck, I can play some more with the new novel, which is almost 90% finished.
But when it comes to weekends, there are certain other things you need to take care of, as illustrated here by my cat/personal assistant Coconut:
When Bad Assignments Happen to Good Freelancers Part 1
If you're in your first six months or year of freelancing, you may feel like you don't have the luxury of turning down assignments. Everyone who goes into business for himself or herself knows the feeling of wondering if this will be the last assignment they'll ever get. But after a while, particularly if you have a core group of clients who return to you repeatedly, you start to realize that you are at least as valuable to them as they are to you. And sometimes they'll assign you stuff that for whatever reason, just isn't your thing.
Last year I had a client come to me needing a metric crap-ton of copy for someone starting a website about Motocross gear: jackets, pants, boots, gloves, helmets, all the stuff people wear. There wasn't a lot of information on the topic that was not sales-related, and try as I would, I could not get interested enough in the topic to really put my heart into the work. But I did it anyway.
The result? A really pissed off client.
I had my client asking me to explain myself, because his client (the one with the website that needed all the copy) claimed it was some of the worst drivel he'd ever seen put down in the English language. Seriously, he didn't even try to be tactful about it: the copy I gave him sucked.
I ended up crying, swearing, and wondering if I should even be in the writing business. I knew that what I wrote wasn't my best work, but I also knew that it wasn't as bad as the client claimed, and that I had fulfilled the basic requirements of the job, in that it was all original work that passed Copyscape, and it had the requested keywords in it, in the proper proportions.
Here's what I should have done instead:
When my client came to me with the assignment, I should have told him, “You know, this is going to be hard for me to write about. There aren't that many resources apart from sales catalogues, and the topic bores me to tears. Do you think you could assign all (or even half) of this to another writer?”
He probably would have sent it on to another writer who would have been happy to have the assignment, who would have done a better job, and which would have freed me up for an assignment that was more suitable. And if the Motocross client had got pissed off, it wouldn't have been at me, which is the important thing. ;)
The moral of this story is: if you have a decent stable of clients sending you enough work on a regular basis, then you probably have the professional clout you need to turn down assignments that are clearly unsuitable for your skills and interests. Yes, you will have to write the occasional stuff you're not really into, but you won't have to risk botching a major assignment and making everyone (including yourself) unhappy.
Be honest when you're sent an assignment that fills you with a sense of dread. If they want it bad enough and have nobody else to do it, then at least negotiate for a slightly higher rate or a more lenient deadline. And have yourself a nice, cold beer when you're done.
When Bad Assignments Happen to Good Freelancers, Part 2
Yesterday I addressed the practicalities of turning down work that you know you can’t or won’t do well. Today, it’s more about keeping the faith in yourself.
I have yet to meet a freelance copywriter who doesn’t do some form of writing for their own enjoyment. I happen to write novels and stories, and I used to do a lot of “just for the hell of it” type of blogging.
One thing I have found that gets me through the tedious, multi-part assignments is promising myself a half hour or an hour to work on “my” stuff once I complete the assignment.
When I worked for a newspaper, another writer there liked researching true crime stories in her spare time, and the sports editor wrote music reviews on his own time. Whether the stuff I write for myself ever sees the light of day or not is rather immaterial. It simply feels good to put down words in the service of something that is important to me just because.
So, no matter how covered up you get with assignments for writing about hair gel or denim leggings (Typing the word “jeggings” makes me shudder.) or automotive headlight cleaning kits, keep that poetry notebook or journal handy. It can keep you reasonably sane and costs a lot less than a psychiatrist.
5 Steps to getting your first freelance writing clients
OK, so I talk about clients this, clients that, blah blah blah, but what if you're just starting out and wondering where you get clients from in the first place? I make no guarantees, but here is what worked for me, in 5 steps.
1. Sign up with a freelancing site. There are several. I've found work on oDesk, and Freelancer, but there are others. The basic sign-up is free, and you create a profile just like on any site. I have heard of freelancers getting work on Craigslist, but I've never done it, so I really don't have any advice other than "be careful."
2. Strongly consider investing in one to two months of their "premium" membership. Freelancer, for one, has lots of jobs that are only shown to premium members, and they say you're more likely to get hired if you're a premium member. I sprung for a month of premium (which was about US$12) and got my first job soon after. Coincidence? Who knows.
3. Add a decent head shot to your profile. People want to put a face with the username that they're hiring. It doesn't have to be anything special, but you should be smiling pleasantly.
4. Take a tip from a drug dealer. To start out, you don't actually give them the first one for free, but damn close. My first job was doing a handful of rewrites for something like a buck apiece. But it wasn't the pay I was after with those first few jobs, it was the positive ratings for my profile. Even if you're only getting a very small amount for the work, give it your best. Write as if you're writing for one of the top editors in the world, and get it to the client on time, or better, early. Follow their directions to the letter.
5. If your client pays you on time, for the amount you agreed to, give them a good feedback rating. It's good karma. If they stiff you, be honest about it. You might save another freelancer from getting taken in.
Once you get enough good ratings, word will get out because, fortunately for you, there are LOTS of really bad writers out there. After a while, you'll get projects pitched to you and you only, and you can consider leaving the freelance sites behind and getting clients on your own, which saves you on processing fees that the sites take. I don't want to knock those fees, because they usually have some kind of escrow system to prevent clients and writers from getting stiffed, but eventually, you'll have a stable of clients you can trust to pay you directly. I hope this helps.
P.S. Back before eHow got taken over by the evil overlords at Demand Media, I wrote an article for them on just this topic, which you can find at http://www.ehow.com/how_5861984_write-freelance-articles-extra-income.html. It goes into more detail and might be helpful. (I've actually made a little residual $ from a bunch of articles I wrote for eHow, though I stopped writing for them after Demand Media took over.) Anyway, good luck!
3 ways non-writing activities help your writing
And no, I’m not talking about drinking.
1. You might actually interact with other people. That’s a bit of a stretch for people like me, who tend to not socialize much, but it’s possible. You interact, and you take in the flow of conversation – awkward or smooth – and your brain makes notes, whether you are aware of it or not. If nothing else, it will help you write better dialog.
2. Your brain engages your hands in a different way. I’ve got a nice, smooth path from brain to keyboard, but the brain / hand interaction for me isn’t so automatic with other things I do, like if I’m making a pie crust or sewing something. For you it might be draining a crank case or casting a fishing line. I have no scientific proof, but I think that giving the part of your brain that gets the words onto the screen a rest now and then is good for it.
3. You’ll learn all kinds of new stuff you never expected. You want to learn about life? Have a conversation with a bright 10-year-old. You may think you know how real people live, but until you hear the neighbors drunkenly yelling at each other over the rightful owner of the Firebird up on blocks in the yard (Yeah, I live in a bad neighborhood.) and then see one of them whip out an iPhone and look up the state’s vehicle title laws, you really don’t know as much as you think.
Moral of the story: if you want to be a better writer, sometimes you need to make the conscious decision to not write for a while. Even if it's doing something as mundane as getting the formatting issues worked out for an e-book, the non-writing part of your life is necessary for the writing part of your life to continue moving forward. So make sure you incorporate enough not-writing into your life, however that may manifest itself.
How the elevator pitch can help you write a book summary
OK, so you've written a book or a story and you want to publish it electronically. At some point you'll need to write a very short description of the content, and this description can have a huge bearing on whether people download your work or not, so it needs to be good.
Where do you start?
Well, thanks to my Twitter buddy Ghostwritermc, I discovered yesterday that one place to start is with the "elevator pitch." This is the super brief summary of your idea / book / screenplay / invention that you share with the CEO of MegaAngelVentureCapital Inc., should you find yourself on an elevator with her. It's gotta be short enough that you can get the whole thing out of your mouth over the course of an average elevator trip.
(Just as an aside, I have to do some mental extrapolation on this, because in my town the tallest building is two stories, so elevator rides are shorter here than they are in the developed world.)
Anyway, here's the link for coming up with the elevator pitch:http://mymarketingthing.com/pr-and-free-media-exposure/some-people-call-it-an-elevator-pitch/
You should go read the whole thing, but here's the skinny version, as applied to your book:
1. A key emotive word relating to your business (book) Example: "Satisfying"
2. The practical element(s) of your business service (book) Example: "It's available in all electronic formats as well as print."
3. What makes your business (book) special? Example: "It gently skewers modern American society through satire."
4. What is the benefit generally experienced? Example: "It will pique your interest in the many ways modern culture affects everyday life."
Now clearly, that's not a book blurb, but it's some good stuff you could use to start writing one.
Just remember that when you write that short pitch for your book, you only have a few seconds to convince the person reading it that they should buy your book, so put some real thought and effort into it rather than dashing off 400 characters off the top of your head.
The excuse of 'being a writer' only goes so far
There's nothing really wrong with saying, "I'm writing a book" as an excuse for things like not cooking, getting behind on the laundry, or generally being unavailable for things you'd rather not do. But at some point, you have to realize that there are certain responsibilities you really should address.
Case in point: finances. This will sound incredibly stupid, but over the past couple of years, I have probably written the equivalent of a whole book on the topic of 0% balance transfer credit cards, all the while charging stuff to my one credit card that has some horrendous interest rate attached to it.
This morning, the combination of having to write another piece on this as well as getting a 0% balance transfer credit card offer in the mail finally tripped a wire in my head and made me ask myself: "Mary, you dolt, why in the world are you paying some usurious rate when you at least theoretically could buy yourself a year's breathing room by getting yourself one of those cards?"
Now, I've also written enough to know that there are catches with these offers, and that it's really easy to let a year slip by and suddenly discover you're about to go back to a high interest rate, but there is the chance, at least, that I could save some serious dough. (Note that for me, anything above $20 counts as "serious dough.")
While being a freelancer and / or writing a book make perfect explanations when people ask why you can't sign up for the $50 a plate fundraiser or go on vacation with them, it's absolutely no excuse for being irresponsible with the money you do make.
Bottom line: if you're smart enough to make a living writing, you're smart enough not to waste money on stupid things like interest rates you don't have to be paying.
2 things Don Draper taught me about success
Yeah. I'm going to cop to being a fan of MadMen. Honestly, I could watch it with the sound turned off because the early to mid 1960s are my favorite era in fashion history. If someone gave me a chance to work in their wardrobe department I'd be like, "Kids, it's been fun, but I'm out of here. So long suckers!"
I got my first (and only) real corporate America job with benefits, promotions, and a healthy paycheck in 1987 and by then the women's movement had progressed to the point that female professionals had the option of behaving like total assholes at work, too.
So even though there were a few isolated (but serious) incidents of sexism in the workplace, I had the option of pointing out my master's degree to some dick with equal or less education than I had and telling him to fuck off. But although I certainly don't miss the crap women had to put up with in the 60s workplace, I can still take a couple of pointers from Don Draper.
(Now, since I am capable of telling fiction from reality, this is all just total bullshit conjecture, but then again I like writing fiction, and what is fiction writing other than lots of total bullshit conjecture? Anyway, here are the two things.)
1. Your past doesn't matter. I used to anesthetize sheep and pigs for surgery for a veterinary school. I was an engineer for awhile. I raised a couple of kids. I took the minimum required literature courses to get through college. And still they let me write! Sure, it's not as dramatic as assuming someone's identity after watching them get blown up in a foxhole, but still.
2. Take your lumps and move on. You don't see Don Draper whining just because some hitchhikers he picked up drugged him with phenobarbital, knocked him unconscious, and robbed him blind. Nope, he got up, cleaned himself up and went to the office anyway!
Only rarely do clients do that to me. In fact, the "disasters" in my day are usually along the lines of "Hey, Mary, the client wants this to be a little more sales-y. Can you do a quick edit?" I've learned to utter a few rude words under my breath, fix the problem, and get on with life.
To sum it up: don't ever let anyone tell you you can't be a writer because you have the "wrong" degree, or because you "just" raised four kids, or because you come from a hick town where nothing happens. And when you are a writer, and shit happens, deal with it and move on. Nobody can make you stop telling your stories.
3 things your teachers really were right about
I'm very fond of saying that the only thing worthwhile I learned before college was how to type. But that's not entirely true. I did have a couple of really good teachers along the way, and some of those things they said that I rolled my eyes at have turned out to be surprisingly true:
1. You really will use algebra in real life. And in my case, I'm totally discounting the time I spent as an engineer. I'm talking actual real life. Like today, I'm working on a bunch of stuff for a cooking site, and it made me really want a pumpkin pie, so I made one. The only problem was, the only measuring utensils clean were a teaspoon and a 1/4 cup measuring cup. And my pie crust recipe calls for 1/3 cup of shortening. Algebra to the rescue! (Oh, and I found out that one of those things your mother says, in this case "Tin can edges are sharp, so be careful not to cut yourself," is true as well. We're talking right across the knuckles.)
2. Conjugating foreign verbs really does improve language skills. And not just in the foreign language. I find that if I have to use my foreign language skills for an email, or whatever, the subject-verb-agreement corner of my brain works better in English for the whole rest of the day. Weird.
3. The law of diminishing returns really does apply to just about everything. My 8th grade history teacher, Mr. B. loved Coca Cola (back in the days when it used real sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup) more than anything. But he explained the law of diminishing returns with an analogy of someone offering him free Coke after free Coke until eventually even he couldn't stand it. Think about it:
That second marshmallow Easter Peep is only about half as good as the first, and so on.
If you have eight pairs of riding boots, you don't feel as special putting them on as you would if you only had one pair (though if anyone would like to send me 8 pairs of riding boots in order to test this out scientifically, hey, I'm game).
Even Don Draper gets tired of sex if he bangs too many women on one episode of Mad Men.
I seem to have inadvertently finished up this guide, such as it is, on a Mad Men theme, but I guess that’s as good enough a place as any to stop. If you’re thinking of freelancing full-time, then more power to you. It’s hard work for not a lot of money, but for me, anyway, it’s been worth it.
Hopefully you’ll find some use for what you’ve read here, and I hope you’ll visit my blog regularly (http://marykittneel.com) and have a look at some of my other books on Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/marykittneel).