April 28, 2005
Not a very exciting day so far. Pretty routine in a keep-your-ass-planted-in-the-chair kind of way. When I got down to biz at 9:00, I dithered for a bit, then jumped in on the current novel for about an hour. I ended up cutting a bunch of it--too much backstory. I can just tell this novel's gonna be a killer if I don't get over the backstory problem, the, "yeah, but before we go on, let me tell you about what happened yesterday, and six months ago, and two months before that, and..."

Then I worked on the journal I edit. One of the pieces was written by a guy in Pakistan, and although the content is of interest to the readership, it's requiring me to practically rewrite the thing from scratch to make it comprehensible. Way too much work, in this case. And then there's the usual "where's this feature Feature," which is to say, things we regularly have, but I haven't received yet. I'm running behind on this little bit, but we'll get it managed.

Hunting through old Freelance Success newsletters looking for interesting good paying markets I haven't tried yet or recently. Came up with a few. I'll have to research them a bit and query. I can tell I'm running into the regular slow patch, to which I generally respond by panicking and marketing my brains out and ending up with 9 or 10 assignments. Whenever I start on this Leanne rolls her eyes and says, and you always end up with work, so chill. Her confidence is fairly inspiring.

Which brings me slowly back to the title of this bit, which is to say that I find my writing career to be constantly evolving. I never expected to be writing so much about genetics, biotech, and for God sakes, never expected to write about computational biology or Medicare. Or to be writing about practice management or computer security. At the same time, once again I seem to have the possibility of several books being picked up. We'll see, keep our fingers crossed this time. Won't jinx it, no we won't.

Evolutionarily yours,
Mark Terry