September 19, 2005
Friday evening I was obsessing over work with my wife, discussing the fact that October looked a little thin, income-wise, just as she and my oldest son were taking off to pick up the pizza for dinner. A matter of minutes later--literally--my office phone rang. 6:30 on a Friday evening didn't strike me as being promising. It could have been a spam-fax, or a wrong number, but I'm obsessive-compulsive enough to go and answer it because, after all, I'm in Eastern Standard Time and many of the people I deal with are in Central, Mountain or Pacific time zones.

Voila! It was the editor of one of my newest clients. I'd done one article for him and thought I did a good job. They are, to date, my best-paying client, and I wasn't feeling terribly secure in the notion that I would be doing more work for them. I had already pitched him a second article and hadn't heard back. Well, he wanted to catch me before the weekend and assign me two articles due mid-October, here were the topics...

Happy. You bet. And pretty indicative of the "leap of faith," I've talked about so much here. I may fret and stew, but my wife always says, "Something will come up. It always does." And, thank God, so far it has.

Try to do good, very good or excellent work. Give the editor what they want. Never miss a deadline and, in fact, I tend to always run at least a day or so early, sometimes more. Be professional and reliable. And sometimes the work comes to you.

Best,
Mark Terry