During The Game I could never get enough money socked away to cover my expenses for a year (granted they were really high expenses) and have enough (or lucrative enough) contracts to keep the pipeline full , but it gave me a taste of the whip you slave under and the wire you walk going freelance.

I would love to freelance, love to leave this crazy job, but I worry about being able to make ends meet and losing what I do have.

I tell myself that if, no, when I start to sell, I can off my mortgage and take a real look at freelancing. The issue is getting it to happen. So, I just keep my nose to the grindstone and continue to put out the best product I can.

Thanks for all your advice. It will be my bible when I finally get there.

I hope your hunches are good–that you made a similar move back in the day is very encouraging.

Enjoy your teaching this week.

Cheers,
Ev

Great stuff, guys. Thank you for all the comments! I’m teaching this week, so my time on the blog is limited.

Ev, I got a 20-hour per week job when I made the switch from non-fiction to fiction. I had to pay the bills somehow and I was cutting out the bulk of my income to try to move to a different part of freelancing. It worked. So good luck with the interview! I have a hunch it’ll all work for you.

Good stuff here. Thank you but also argh–

I run my own freelance business, Ev’s Writing Services, and I love it for all the reasons you mention, yet in two hours I have a day job interview. The position is just twenty hours a week and I want to have more time/energy to focus on my fiction, less financial demands that I be constantly advertising/looking for jobs.

I hope I’m not copping out . . . but I guess, even if I am, I can always quit a few months down the line.

And congrats on doing your own negotiating. Awesome and brave!

Cheers,
Ev

If I take up a work-for-hire project, I don’t necessarily bring to it the same love as I would something entirely my own. Doesn’t mean I won’t try to bring to itt the same level of craft, nor that I won’t have fun putting somebody else’s character through their paces.

If you can enjoy your work, you might be a hack, but at least you’ll be a happy one.

Art and craft are entwined, and trying to pull them apart and pin them to different boards is, from where i sit, a waste of time.

You might prefer Picasso to Norman Rockwell, but both men knew how to use their brushes.

It’s a rare writer who doesn’t have some kind of day job, at least for a while. sometimes that might be asking somebody if they want fries with that; sometimes, it might be doing a novel in a shared universe. Most of the pro writers I know have done that, and there’s no shame in it.

Scott Nicholson

I just had a short story picked up by my community college publication for its seventh annual issue, which is great because I want to see that publication keep going. It only pays in two copies of the magazine, so it’s not exactly a good risk.

A lot of people would tell one not to submit to such a magazine, simply because it doesn’t make good business sense. And they’d be right, if that’s all a writer did. I wrestled around with that.

But ultimately, I came the realization that I can submit anywhere I want, for whatever reason I want, and I don’t worry about giving up first publication rights on that story because it’s just one story, and I can write one a week and submit them elsewhere to higher paying markets.

I like feeling like that, because it makes it okay to fail, and therefore I take more risks. A story is a story, and it’s either good or bad. But the only person who can’t decide which is me, so I should just submit it and move on.

I remember hearing of Frederick Herzberg’s “Two-Factor Theory” while sitting in Psych 101 at some ungodly hour of the morning a couple of decades ago. He did a good job defining the characteristics of a motivator. It might be worth a quick google for those who haven’t heard of it.

Good job combining the ideas. “Figure out what you need as a freelancer and what you want for yourself and your career…” In figuring out that need, a person should understand their own motivators (recognition, responsibility, and challenging work being three that Herzberg mentions). There’s a risk that these factors might change significantly in the freelance world. A new freelance writer motivated by recognition, for example, might have a hard time adjusting to a steady diet of editor rejections. That would be a risk worth knowing about up front.

Rick

I’m featuring excerpts of crowdfunded projects, over on my blog “Hypatia’s Hoard of Reviews.” I’d love to do one for “Freelancers Survival Guide” — I haven’t covered a nonfiction project yet, and I’m sure my readers would be interested in it. If this appeals, let me know.

I would need:
Project name
Creator name
URL where you want the link(s) to point
Brief summary of project, including your crowdfunding model
Excerpt that would hook new readers

I often need my wife to talk me down and say, hey honey, look at it this way, and then she points out where I’ve possibly gone down any number of rabbit holes on a given issue, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

When it comes to writing, I’ve discovered that I am very afraid to “risk” on novels. Shorter work? It’s easy to do that because it doesn’t take as much time or planning, and if a short work fails or doesn’t tender results, no big deal, I can forget about it and move on to the next piece of short fiction.

Novels? Wow, whole other animal, at least for me. So much time, so much thought, so many ways to screw it up, the fear of failure — of botching it — can and does drag the novel project to a halt. Because what happens if the novel fails? It’s a colossal waste of time and effort. Do I risk that time and effort on something like a novel? Often, in the past, the answer has been, no.

Dean talks about novel-as-event and how this f***s up the writer in several ways. I think I’m really beginning to see how this has been a stumbling block for me, in my writing progression. I’ve let the novel become a much bigger thing than it actually is. My perception of the thing — massive undertaking, must not fail — grows far beyond the thing itself, so that I am often loathe to undertake a novel because I am too afraid of the risk: of failing, losing the time and energy, etc.