Freelance! Thursday, Aug 27 2009

    I’m not just a writing spider. I’m a freelance writing spider. I have a 9-5 gig with a Giant Corporation at which I hold the title of Peon and this pays the bills, but the dream job is full-time freelance writing. While I’m not there quite yet – can’t quit the day job – I’m thinking about it a lot, and making some moves in that direction.

      Technically speaking, I have been a freelance writer for twelve years. What I’ve done amounts to a mishmash of genres, industries, and products for a menagerie of clients. I daresay that the vast majority of my freelance work sort of floated to me on the free-ether. That is to say, I didn’t ask for it, it found me. After college I went about being a writer all wrong. I was looking in the paper, thinking, “This is where everybody else finds jobs…” And there were a few, to be sure. But I don’t think that’s how you get to be a freelance writer anymore. Also, I spent a lot of time submitting fiction work instead of looking for ways to develop my journalistic and non-fiction tendencies. I’ve had regular consistent freelance gigs that consisted of such glamorous work as newsletters for nurses. True, I did have a local shopping column that I enjoyed writing immensely, and that was pretty sexy. I’m starting to realized however that if I really wanna do this thing called freelance writing I’m going to have to hustle more.

    I put up a website. I made business cards. I…well…that’s it. I did the website and the cards. That’s enough, right?

    No.

    I’m thinking of you newbies out there who want to know how you become a freelance writer. The short answer is, I don’t know because I’m not really there. The long answer is…read along and we’ll figure it out.

    I had to give up the romantic idea of Being a Writer. There are all kinds of people who fit the definition of writer, people who write ad copy, newspaper articles, novels, the brochures for teeth whitening in your dentist’s office. I used to have the same romantic notions. If I tell people, “I’m a writer,” they seem to get this idea that I come home from my 9-5 job and light candles by which I will dip my quill into ink and scrawl for hours on parchment while listening to Bach. This didn’t even apply to me when I was actually doing freelance full time. Mostly I was lucky to put on pants before noon and I certainly wasn’t writing anything exciting. Ghostwriting for home health trade pubs, anyone? I’m an editor, too, but the most important thing I’ve edited was a book. On project management.

     I struggled for years to identify myself as a writer and now that I own that label, I finally let go of those romantic ideas for more practical ones like, “Will this job pay my bills?” I can’t speak for all freelancers, but I suspect they feel mostly the same.

     I do have a secret. It’s the secret to  getting more freelance work than you will via free-ether. My big secret is…you find freelance gigs by asking for them. That’s it. You go ask people if you can write stuff for them. Sometimes they say no. Sometimes they say yes. Sometimes you never hear a word from them. My problem right now is that I’m not asking enough.

     I’ve gotten lazy. I have 500 business cards and about 475 are here on my desk. The other 25 are…either in the bottom of my purse or my mom’s purse. My business cards should be out working for me. Ditto the website. It should be doing more work for me. Having a full time job allows me the freedom/excuse to do whatever I want when I feel like it which is…sometimes. In fact, I bought a second-hand  scanner off craigslist and only now, four months later, do I plug it in to find out it’s not compatible with my XP.  I’m not too worried. I’ll save up, get a better scanner, and put up the rest of my portfolio online. If I was out of work, or had some kids, I’d probably be more motivated.

     Beyond the question of motivation, it’s a question of confidence. Ah, the truth comes out. Maybe I’m not good enough to ask Vanity Fair/Esquire/Real Simple/This American Life to publish my work. Maybe I don’t want to spend time getting rejected unless I have to. Frankly, I’m really hoping that Graydon Carter, David Granger, Kristin Van Ogtrop, or Ira Glass will just email me and say, “I’d like you to do a piece about x. We will pay you ONE MILLION DOLLLLARRRSSS. It’s due in a month.” That’s what I’m really hoping for.

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Vacay 2009 Thursday, Aug 20 2009

    I haven’t been on a family vacation in five years. In fact, I haven’t been on ANY vacation in five years. My honeymoon to Cancun was the last real trip and that was indeed a trip. When my mom proposed I join them on an excursion to Destin, Florida, I thought, “YES finally a real vacation.”  My sister and her SF (Special Friend) went, too, although they stayed in a condo down the street from ours.  Husband did not, for reasons I will not go into here, accompany us to the Sunshine State. My mom and dad and I drove ten hours to the panhandle in a lovely rental SUV-thingy. My sister and her SF drove separately and we met periodically through the week.

    During the week I was in Florida I managed to get a raging head cold AND start my Dirty Lady Time. I also have eczema. As biological disasters go, I was batting a thousand. I spent the first three nights of the trip stoned out of my mind on cold medicine. But let me tell you, that generic ny-quil blue stuff for sore throats is the magic elixir of sinus colds as far as I’m concerned. In the absence of a good hot toddy, try the blue stuff. Also good if you have crippling cramps from the aforementioned DLT.

     As a big word nerd* I read all the signs on the road. The top three signs from this trip:

    1. FREE HOT! breakfast  WordPress’s font capabilities prevent me from illustrating this better, but the first two words and punctuation were HUUUGE and then ‘breakfast’ was tiny. This sign prompted a fifteen-minute conversation between me and my dad including – Do they charge for COLD? Can you get a side of cold? Can you take the HOT! around with you places?

     2. TOURIST INFO HOSPITAL My dad was way more tickled about the idea that there is a special hospital for tourists and info.

     3. Boobie BungalowObviously a purveyor of Adult distractions. The impressively large piece of plywood sported a hand-painted blonde in a red bikini. If only we’d had time to stop and snap a photo… I just think saying the phrase ‘boobie bungalow’ is funny. “Boobie” is a funny word anyway and the alliteration of ‘boobie’ and ‘bungalow’…well, hilarity ensues.

 

     There was  a lot of lying on the beach and jumping around in the waves. The best day was a few hours before Tropical Storm Claudette rolled in and the waves were choppy and strong. That’s the best time to jump in, I think, when there’s a slight chance that the sea might eat you. Of course, I am always coated in a thick layer of Banana Boat’s best SPF 212 T-shirt In A Bottle.  I have fair skin that doesn’t tan well, so I tend to use the thick stuff that takes half an hour to apply and then you look sort of atomically bright white.  Whatever. I’m not getting skin cancer if I can help it.

    We shopped at the outlet malls and ate dinner in restaurants that served pretty much the same thing, but who cares, fried scallops ROCK. Naturally every night featured a screeching serenade from whatever sandy sunburned kids happened to be sitting nearby. What is it with me and screeching children? They follow me – restaurants, movie theaters, concerts – they’re always there. 

    My whole life my dad has dragged us out to the backyard to look for meteors.** The Perseids, the Leonids, whatever comet is flying by. There have been two instances when this really paid off – once, on a lake in Canada my dad and I were the only two who happened to see the most spectacular shooting star ever. It was like the fake kind in movies, glittering with a trillion-mile-long tail.  The second time was somewhere in Florida when the shooting star broke into two pieces and one flamed green. This year, on our Florida vacation, Dad and I made the ten-minute trek to the beach to spread out a blanket and see what we could see. We knew we couldn’t see much before midnight but you never know. The first night was a total bust. The second night proved more fruitful on many fronts – we saw about five actual meteors, but the real show was the couple in the middle of their respective Big Finishes about twenty yards away. Yes, I walked onto the beach with my dad (who’s 66) just in time to hear Cletus give Bobby Sue a Saturday Night Special. Just when I thought we’d gotten past the supreme awkwardness of that bit, a trio of people twenty yards in the other direction started having a huge argument about TRAAAACEEEYYYYY. I know her name was Tracey because the one woman kept hoarsely hissing “TRAAAAYY-SAAAAY.”

    I got a little tan, got some great clothes, ate more seafood than you can shake a trident at. And I was ready to be home. I missed Husband and the Ferrets. Thank God I got home before ALL the plants died (Husband didn’t water them and they were pretty crispy). I was glad to be in my OLB*** and see my garden glowy balls changing color in the dark.

   

 

* I always want to write that ‘werd nerd’ or ‘werd nord.’

** Meteors? Meteorites? We never know which is correct.

*** Own Little Bed

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Things I Really Miss: Mixed Tapes Tuesday, Aug 4 2009

    “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.” – Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

     Every once in a while, I find myself missing something. A ritual, an item, a shared experience. I’m thinking of making this a regular feature for this blog, but today I just want to think about good old mixed tapes. Do people make mixed tapes (CDs? iPod mixes?) for other people anymore? I think this is one of my top five things I miss about college – being introduced to new music and, by default, learning more about your friends, through the medium of the mixed tape. For those of you who do not remember mixed tapes, I will define them thus – a mixed tape was a specifically chosen group of songs copied onto an old-fashioned cassette tape and given to the recipient. The reasons for participating in such activities were myriad – you wanted somebody else to think this obscure band you love was cool, too. For romantic reasons. For friendship reasons. For reasons of the musical education of another human being. Sure, I love my Pandora and my internet radio. But there is something infinitely warmer and more intimate about getting a group of songs specially chosen for you by a human bean who knows you, at least a little bit.

    I think my first mixed tape, though not a mixed tape in the traditional sense, was half R.E.M’s Automatic for the People and half Apollo 13 by They Might Be Giants. And the person who made it for me will likely read this and remember more about it, and you can correct my memory if you like. It wasn’t a traditional mixed tape in that there were only two bands represented, only two musical stylings, but it did fulfill the criteria of musical education. R.E.M and TMBG are still two of my favorite groups, even though R.E.M seems to have zoned out a little bit but that’s a story for another post.

     College was the real scene for the mixed tape. Though I didn’t attend a particularly well-mixed college (lots of middle-class and upper-middle class white kids from Kentucky and a few other places), there were lots of cultural educational opportunities. There were mixed tapes for your summer vacation, made for friends you might not see for three months. There were the professions of love sung through the lyrics of The Cure, Dave Matthews Band, Sarah Maclachlan. There were tapes made because the giver just couldn’t contain her zeal for a particular artist – Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, David Gray. You can’t just walk up to a person and say, “Hey, your love? It’s better than ice cream. Better than CHOCOLATE!” It’s cheesy. And you stole those lyrics. Didn’t we see how this turned out for Cyrano?

     My friend A was a DJ at her college a few states away. She sent me a tape and one side had the radio show she did with her college friend. Of course, as a Toriphile I loved that the show was called Happy Phantoms and the tape included several Tori songs including Take to the Skywhich is still one of my favorites. “Have a seat while I take to the sky.” The other side was a mix of songs in the vein of other mixed tapes. Barenaked Ladies, Poi Dog Pondering, B-side stuff that hadn’t quite reached my school yet. We didn’t have a radio station at my school so hearing this was a peek into college life for other people, and a connection to my friend who was hundreds of miles away.

     My senior year I spent a semester in London. I went on my way with at least two memorable mixed tapes – one from the guy I was dating and one from a dear college friend. I could hardly stand to listen to the one from the boyfriend because it was full of sad songs about going home. Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound and The Only Living Boy in New York, Peter Paul and Mary’s Leavin on a Jet Plane. But my friend R’s tape got me through some rough times so far from home. It was full of support and energy, just what an anxious Kentucky girl needed on her first trip abroad. One from a Chorus Line, I’m The Greatest Star from Funny Girl, the Indigo Girls’ Tangled Up in Blue, Don’t Dream Its Over by Crowded House.  I walked the park near the college in Regent’s Park, remembering home and very glad to be away. The cover, decorated with stickers and her distinctive handwriting, was durable plastic  reminder of home, even in the medival streets of Germany or the bustling high roads of London.

     I still have some of these tapes, though I don’t listen to them much anymore. They are stretched thin with years of play and replay. But they are mementos of relationships. They’re like watching children discover and fall in love with their new world, you can’t help but be moved with them, at least until the tape player clicks off and you flip to the other side.

     I went to that huge music festival in Atlanta one year, I think it was the summer after I graduated. I went to visit one of my roommates who lived there. I think the festival is Music in the City or something. I was so excited to see Oasis and Collective Soul. While we waited with the thousands of other concert-goers, a guy near us and I struck up a conversation. He was, like so many people at the time, a huge fan of the band Phish. My freshman year roommate had loved Phish and I just couldn’t get into them much. This guy insisted that I was missing out. We ended up exchanging addresses – he lived in Ohio. Cincinnati, I think. He wanted to send me a Phish CD. A few weeks later the CD arrived, complete with a handwritten letter explaining his choices. This was the zealous band-fan type of mix but his letter highlighted his genuine affection for this music. In return, I sent him a short story I had written. Although I like Gotta Jibboo, I still don’t love Phish. But this was such a unique encounter. The guy didn’t want to start some long-distance romance, he didn’t call me five thousand times. I even wrote him back thanking him and leaving it open for further contact but I never heard from him again. Just a Phish disciple spreading the gospel of the Phish, I suppose.

    In grad school, I was friends with one of those writer-types who’s a little extra sensitive, a little hermit-ish, a bit enamored of the writing life. He had hundreds of CDs and he took it upon himself to make me a three volume mixed set of music he thought I should have heard. I discovered Kate Rusby’s delicate voice, Morcheeba,  more Johnny Cash that I’d had in one place, and a host of other songs I delighted in hearing. The guy is gone, moved on to a professorship somewhere, but I still have the CDs.

    There’s something beautifully tangible about a mixed tape or CD. Like a love letter, it carries more weight than its electronic counterparts. And like the love letter or the handwritten note, the mixed tape seems to be fading into my memory as a quaint little thing we used to do. I’m no Luddite, but I miss the rituals if only for the meaning behind them, but also for the activity of creating them. Asking friends to make me a mixed tape seems childish. People are busy. People don’t get excited about new bands and new music like we did in high school and college, do we? We listen to our Pandora and download the songs we find ourselves, and shut out the recommendations of our friends.

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Thugku: Odes to my Neighbors Tuesday, Aug 4 2009

Thug Life has been pretty quite the last week or so. They had a bit of fun last night (WTF parties on SUNDAY NIGHT??) but nothing too horrid, comparatively. But I’ve just got so many feelings about Thug Life, I’m pouring them into these haiku. 

 

1.

Bottles clink loudly

Always smashing smashing smash

Aren’t you underage?

 

2.

Your mama at home

Crying into her pillow

‘Where did I go wrong?’

 

3.

T-shirt,  backward cap

Drawers busting out your man-pris

Your shoes are too big

 

4.

Your car frightens me

Missing paint, bumper, mirror

Full of loud music

 

5.

Neighborhood silent

Peaceful people living here

Then assholes moved in

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