September 15, 2005
If there's any theme running throughout this blog--aside from, Gee, Mark's kind of neurotic--it's that writing for a living requires a kind of leap of faith. Generally speaking we don't know where the next assignment's coming from. Or if the next assignment's coming at all. In a way, this makes "unemployment" something of a regular feature of our jobs.

In a way, I'm lucky. One of the things that I wonder about fulltime novelists is that they essentially have one client, and as most people know these days, publishers are a fickle and unreliable lot unless you're hitting the bestseller lists. (And maybe even if you are). At least with me I've got about 10 regular clients and 4 or 5 semi-regular clients and I seem to bring on a handful of one-shots--clients I write an article for and for whatever reason can't get a handle on their market or they didn't pay well enough or (gulp) whatever I did for them didn't quite set them on fire. I actually don't think I've got any of those, but I'm pretty sure there's one client I wrote for where I just don't "get" what their magazine is about. It's technical and I pitched them one story and they came back with a suggestion for a related story, I wrote it, they liked it, they paid well, I pitched another story, they said, "Not quite right for us, try again," and I did and I did and none of them seemed quite right and they kind of stopped responding. And I keep thinking I should try again, but whenever I go back to their online content I just sort of draw a blank. Oh well.

So if this is a leap of faith, I can assure you that the typical freelancer--okay, maybe just me--has crises of faith on a regular basis. Where I worry if this is going to work out longterm. Where I wonder if I'll be able to hold up my end of the financial household. Where the Idea Machine seems to be running on empty and your energy level seems low and you doubt you'll ever get another assignment from anybody, let alone your regular clients. And that fiction thing! Forgeddaboudit!

I just have to remind myself--something will come up, it always does. And for all the current neuroses, I have four or five articles I need to work on, but the deadlines aren't too close, and I'm still waiting on comments re the collaboration agreement... If you have the faith of a mustard seed ... or a 12-point Times New Roman period! You can move mountains...

Best,
Mark Terry