June 6, 2005
When I made the leap to fulltime freelancing, I felt like I had to sell my wife on it. I think she was ready for me to take the jump, but allowed me to make the salespitch. One of the things I told her emphatically was that some months would be better than others. Some months I might make $500 and some months I might make $5000. She understood and expected it.

How come I'm the guy who has the hard time dealing with it? Leanne seems cool with it, mostly. Me, on the other hand, find it to be the primary source of real stress in writing. I can say that last month was a bad month paywise, receiving slightly over $1000 in income. Which followed April, which was over $5000. Well, I received a check today for $1650, exceeding all of May with a single magazine article, and I'm still expecting my book advances and my fee for editing the technical journal and miscellaneous other things. June ought to be well over $5000, as well. I felt, not for the first time, like I had stumbled out of some barren wasteland and into an oasis. (And excitedly hopped into the car and drove to the credit union and promptly deposited it into my savings account).

It's tough to get used to. I thank the gods regularly that I don't have to worry about paying for healthcare insurance and that my wife has a good steady job. I have a pair of married friends who are both freelancers, and I have total sympathy for them in terms of finances.

One of the tricks to dealing with this, I think, is to not start thinking of the entire writing career as the barren wasteland and the good months as the palm tree-studded oasis. You really need to think of your writing career as a verdant countryside with rich supplies of sustenance--maybe even a good restaurant, theater and grocery store (and liquor store) along the way--with the occasional dry patch of desert to stumble through.

It feels like a regular leap of faith. Between checks, you say, oh, they owe me money, it's coming any time now. Same way with being between writing gigs. Oh, something will come up. And so far, it has. That's my own particular leap of faith, and I make it just about every day. It's changed my life and my point of view. I now see life as more of an adventure with good things on the horizon. When I was working in cytogenetics I tended to think of life as dull and repetitive with only occasional positive things happening, and they were unpredictable. I had a good life, but I had to convince my self of it on a regular basis. They're still unpredictable, I guess, but that's part of the joy of it. I made a change in my mindset, and thank the gods for the change. Every day's an adventure.

Best,
Mark Terry