I got behind this month, since I’m moving my office, but here’s April’s list.  It’s another long list, without a lot of nonfiction on it, since most of what I’ve been reading for research is somewhat dry (she writes with great understatement).  The essays and fiction reading have been wonderful this month, and I rediscovered a few authors I forgot about, found a few I had meant to read, and one I had mistaken for someone else.

All in all, a very good month.

April, 2009

Allyn, Doug, “The Valhalla Verdict,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April, 2009.  Doug Allyn has a gift for the double reversal, one that fits with both plot and character.   “The Valhalla Verdict” is a case in point—a strong story that has its share of surprises for the reader and for the main character.  I don’t dare say much more except read the story.  It’s excellent.

Balogh, Mary, Then Comes Seduction, Dell, 2009.  I nearly stopped reading this novel in the middle.  I set it down for days, and wondered why.  As I’ve said before, I love Mary Balogh’s work.  So I picked it up again and realized what had bothered my subconscious.

The book’s hero is the victim of severe verbal abuse.  He begins the novel drunk, and does something horrible to our heroine—although midway through, he realizes what he is doing and stops.  The main action of the book takes place three years later, when the events of that night become public.

While this is an historical romance novel, it is at its core a novel about the cycle of abuse and how to break free of that abuse.  Because I’ve lived that cycle, I often abandon books on this topic out of sheer personal discomfort.

I’m glad I didn’t quit this time.  The book is sensitive and beautifully done.  It treats almost everyone involved (except the initial abuser—long dead when the story opens) fairly and with compassion.  The romance is damn fine, the characters excellent, and the writing lovely.  I can’t recommend the book enough.

Child, Lee, Bad Luck and Trouble, Dell, 2007.  I kept seeing Lee Child books and hearing how wonderful they were.  But I had read one a dozen years ago and hadn’t liked it—or so I thought. Then in the middle of April, I was reading a review  in Publisher’s Weekly (yes, I know, I occasionally have positive responses to reviews, and I do read them) and realized that I had confused Lee Child with another author who debuted about the same time and had a similar name. 

So I headed to the local used bookstore to see if my assumption of mistaken identity was correct.  It was.  I bought a Lee Child book on the spot. 

Child has a series character named Jack Reacher.  Reacher is, according to some reviewers, “a tough rough Superman of the crime-busting genre,” but he isn’t.  He’s Travis McGee updated for a modern generation.  (Of course, most modern reviewers have never read Travis McGee, but I digress.) 

In Bad Luck and Trouble, Reacher’s old friends from his special investigations unit in the military start disappearing.  The rest of the unit gets together to solve the case.  The opening is terrifying and quick, the middle of the book a solid investigative mystery, and the end a slam-bam thriller.  I wondered how Child would keep Reacher the hero when the rest of the team was so fascinating, but I needn’t have worried.  He pulled it off.

The novel is a strangely moral bit of fiction as well. (Or maybe not so strange.  If Child’s model is John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, then morality is to be expected.) Except for one dog dying rather horribly off-scene, innocents seem to be off-limits (children, families) at least in this book. By the time I got to the dog, I was so deeply involved in the book that I didn’t care.  (Often I quit novels when pets and children die needless gruesome deaths.  It’s the needless part that I dislike, done purely for sensationalism.  In this case, the dog’s death makes sense, sadly, and it makes me wonder how many animals do indeed die in this way.)

Anyway, I’ve got the upcoming novel on order, and I’m heading back to the used bookstore for the rest that store has in stock.  (My tiny town doesn’t have a new bookstore—and the grocery stores only carry the current bestsellers.)  What I can’t find, I’ll order.  Now.  Great job, Child.  Highly recommended.

Child, Lee, The Killing Floor, Dell, 1998.  I liked Bad Luck and Trouble so much that I picked up the entire inventory of Child’s work at the used bookstore.  Then I ordered the rest of his oeuvre.  I plan to read them all in order, with something else in between so that I don’t o.d. (I did that with Jim Butcher.  I’m just about ready to start reading him again.  One year later.)

This book was a complete shock.  It’s in first person and it’s introspective.  Bad Luck and Trouble is anything but.  The POV character—Jack Reacher—is the same.

I like the first-person Reacher and wonder why Child abandoned him.  In fact, I like him a lot more than 3^rd person Reacher, whom I also liked.  But by the second book (which I’ve just picked up), Child is writing in 3^rd person.  Dunno why.  Would love to ask someday.

I loved this book.  It’s much more powerful than Bad Luck and Trouble, which I enjoyed.  Definitely one of the best debut novels I’ve read in a long, long time.

Gibson, William, Spook Country, G.P. Putnam, 2007.  It’s been years since I’ve read a Bill Gibson novel.  Dunno why I stopped, perhaps because he publishes so infrequently that I just forget.  In fact, I picked up the paperback edition (the premium paperback edition, one of those annoying too-tall paperbacks designed to cost too much money and not fit on your shelves) at a local department store.  I had seen the book there (with a nicely designed cover) and remember that I wanted to read it.

I’m glad I did.  Spook Country follows three rather disaffected characters:  Hollis, a rocker turned journalist; Tito, a young man who is involved in something shady (sponsored by someone who knew his dad in Castro’s Cuba); and Milgrim, a drug addict who may or may not have been kidnapped. 

Of course, all of their stories come together. The stories also intersect on a metaphorical level.  Hollis meets artists who create ghosts of dead rockers on sidewalks (spooks in other words); Tito might be a spy (another spook); and Milgrim doesn’t seem to exist except in squalid hotel rooms paid for by his possible captor (a third kind of spook).  Spook country may be the worlds they inhabit, or it may be the United States, which became, after 9/11, a shadow of its former self, afraid of everything and filled with spies.

This novel is billed as a mainstream spy thriller, but it’s much more than that.  It’s a meditation on where we find ourselves now, yet it has the distance that Canadians have when it comes to the U.S. (Yes, Bill is a Canadian and the climax takes place in Vancouvery, B.C.)  It’s also a wry and somewhat humorous take on the ridiculous seriousness that crept into our lives under the Bush administration.  And it’s got hints of the future.  Bill had to have written this book in 2006, yet some of the technology he describes here has only just filtered into the public consciousness, three years later.  Bill is one of our most visionary writers, and in that, Spook Country does not disappoint.

In fact, it doesn’t disappoint at all.  It’s excellent.  Read it, even if the annoying paperback edition doesn’t fit on specially built paperback bookshelves.

Gopnik, Adam, “Talk it Up,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2009.  A lovely little critical essay on Damon Runyon, occasioned by the revival of “Guys and Dolls” on Broadway.  Gopnik looks at Runyon’s writings, the biographies of Runyon (all of which he finds wanting—not because they’re bad, but because they aren’t deep), and the musical itself.  He links Runyon to Raymond Chandler (which makes sense to probably everyone) and also to David Mamet, which was a stretch to me at first, but I was convinced by the end.  Gopnik finds similarities in their dialogue, stylized and slang-filled.  I’ll grant him that.  The essay did what good essays should, made me want to explore the subject myself, even though I’ve read Runyon and Chandler and Mamet, and see “Guys and Dolls.”  Now I want to do it all again.

Kamp, David, “Rethinking the American Dream,” Vanity Fair, April, 2009.  Fascinating article on the history of the American Dream.  Not just the history of the phrase, which he does explore in this piece, but the history of the concept as well.  While I knew that the innate optimism of Americans is one of our best (and most unusual) qualities as a nation, I did not know most of this.  Kamp looks at how this dream got twisted into a materialistic dream beginning in the 1950s and becoming a frightening spiral by the 1990s.  Now that the materialistic American Dream is imploding, Kamp has some suggestions for ways to view our future—without losing our optimism.  Worth reading just for the history, but his take on the future is good too.

Keeffe, Patrick, “Teachers Who Changed My Life,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2009.  The alumni magazine for the University of Wisconsin-Madison always has excellent articles.  It’s one of the best alumni magazines I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.  This essay by a fulltime writer on learning to write at the UW is excellent.  Maybe I identified with it because I had one of the same teachers.  But I like to think that excellent teaching is universal, and the lessons Keeffe learned here are ones that all great teachers impart.

King, Stephen, “The Pop of King: In Bad Company,” Entertainment Weekly, April 3, 2009.  For EW’s heroes and villains issue, King serves up a list of ten of the worst fictional book bad guys ever.  It’s a great list,truly notable for its use of books instead of movies or television.  In fact, King lists a few bad guys I’d only encountered in film (the Robert Mitchum character in Cape Fear ) and says the book is better.  In this case, the book is The Executioners by John D. MacDonald.  Since I’m about to go on a John D. MacDonald binge in preparation for a new project (don’t I have a great job?), I was happy to see this one. 

But the others are good too.  I agree with the ones I’ve read, although I’m really not sure I’d even put Voldemort on the list, particularly when you have mega-baddies like Sauron on there.  But to each his own.  I can think of one or two King baddies who would be on my list, like Jack Torrance of The Shining—not the movie version, but the book version, a man too human and too sad to be anything but truly evil.

King, Stephen, UR, Kindle Books, Amazon.com, February, 2009.  I loved this story.  Midway through reading it, I announced to the cat asleep on the pillow beside me that I loved the story.  She didn’t care.

As I started the story, however, I didn’t think I would like it much, even though I’m a big King fan.  The story, available only on the Kindle, is about someone resistant to reading on computer who, for personal reasons, finally orders a Kindle.  Of course, since this is a King story, he gets an ominous magic Kindle (bubblegum pink instead of white).  King gets to describe all the gadgetry of the Kindle and the reading experience on the Kindle, which gives the opening a very meta-fiction feel.  I was beginning to think I was reading a Kindle ad.

Then…oh, then…he got into the really seductive part of the Kindle for the reader—all the books available for instant download—and expanded it.  What if you could get not just all the books in the universe, but all books in every universe?  And that’s only the first conceit of the story.  It gets better from there.

Borrow someone’s Kindle. Download.  Enjoy.

Price, Jenny, “Bedtime Story,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2009.  Usually articles on current research are interesting, but not recommendation worthy. This one is because it’s about cutting edge sleep research at the University of Wisconsin, one of the main research institutions in the world. 

The article is notable, not just for what the scientists are doing, but for the facts it has on sleep.  I learned a lot about the importance of sleep (beyond get your 8 hours) and how sleep effects the brain.  There’s also a nifty, nifty graph on the way humans use their time (36% of our lives are spent eating as opposed to 5% spent eating and drinking).  Some of the information in here made me think of Nancy Kress’s classic novella Beggars in Spain, which is about children who’ve been engineered so that they don’t have to sleep (she later turned it into a series of novels).  Even though this research didn’t exist when Nancy finished the original novella, she extrapolated very well.

Read the article; learn something about yourself.

Purdom, Todd, “Children of Paradise,” Vanity Fair, March, 2009.  A nice little nostalgia piece about a strange world, now gone. The children of Hollywood grew up in a protected mid-century normal environment, going to Hollywood High, and hanging out in what they called the Village.  Most of the interviewees, like Candace Bergen, Marlo Thomas, and Robert Wagner, are in their sixties and seventies now.  They view their pasts with forgiveness (something Bergen did not do twenty years ago) and a longing for time gone by.  This is fun, if only as an alien environment story mixed with ancient Hollywood gossip. 

Raffles, Hugh, “Cricket Fighting,” The Best American Essays 2008, edited by Adam Gopnik, Houghton Mifflin, 2008.  The breadth and depth of the world’s differences often stuns me.  The essay here, about gambling on cricket fights in China, surprised me with its science fictional qualities.  Cricket fighting is apparently an old tradition in China, and might just be dying off.  Like so many things here, it has become a victim to a faster-paced culture.

But among middle-aged and older Chinese, cricket fighting remains a grand tradition. Crickets are venerated and studied.  I learned a lot about crickets in this essay, and loved the bits of wisdom imparted.  This essay is worth the price of the volume all by itself.

Rhodes, Stephen, “At the Top of His Game,” The Best American Mystery Stories, 2008, edited by George Pelicanos, Houghton Mifflin, 2008.  I love great con men stories, and what better place to set a con man story than the high-powered Wall Street firms of pre-2008.  Rhodes, who works on Wall Street himself, obviously saw this whole debacle coming, which is just a sidebar on this marvelous story.

This is a con on top of a con on top of a con story, well written and well done.  It’s going to be expanded into a novel, which I already have on order, based on the story.  Wonderful stuff.

Shaw, Sam, “Run Like Fire Once More,” The Best American Essays, 2008, edited by Adam Gopnik, Houghton Mifflin, 2008.  Apparently, every summer, a group of runners run a small urban course in Jamaica, Queens.  They run a race that covers 3,100 miles, so they run for weeks, usually covering fifty miles per day.

Sam Shaw ran with them for one day, didn’t make his fifty miles, and studied them for the rest of the race. These runners don’t get paid; they do this for the spiritual value.  As a person who runs a track daily with my trusty iPod, I found this particular essay fascinating.  I couldn’t imagine running from sunup to sundown, fifty miles on the same course, every day, until I’d covered 3100 miles.

But Shaw helped me understand both what it was like to do such a thing and why someone would. That’s one of the best things the essay form can do—explain inexplicable behavior, and make that behavior worthy, even poetic. 

Slater, Lauren, “Tripp Lake,” The Best American Essays 2008, edited by Adam Gopnik, 2008.  A lovely personal essay about fear and the beginnings of fear.  Also about growing up and growing away from your nuclear family.  Beautifully written and emotional. 

Zacharias, Lee, “Buzzards,” The Best American Essays 2008, edited by Adam Gopnik, 2008.  Someone needs to teach Lee Zacharias how to paragraph.  Seriously.  Paragraphing is more than just a way to separate topics in an essay; paragraphing also involves pacing.  It also signals whether a piece reads quickly or slowly or not at all.

I almost opted for not at all, based entirely on the structure of the page.  The visual presentation of Zacharias’s essay said, “boring textbook” to my mind’s eye.  The first three-quarters of a page of blocky text is one solid paragraph.  Since it was split over two pages, it may actually have been the first page.

Why do I tell you this?  Because I love The Best American Essays volumes, and I’ve learned to trust the editors.  I dip into each piece before deciding to continue or to pass.  I dipped and stayed, but struggled with each page, mostly because I got lost in the big unnecessary blocks of text.

The essay itself is marvelous—an examination of the hated carrion birds over time and from a scientific perspective, interspersed with a sad personal essay about Zacharias’s unsympathetic father.  I’m so glad I read this, but I almost didn’t, and I’m sure many people who bought the volume skipped right over the essay because of that stylistic quirk.

So when you get to Zacharias’s essay, read it.  It’s one of the best essays in the book.  

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle. 

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide:  Insurance

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First, I’ve gotten a lot of great responses to last week’s post on staying positive.  Many of those responses have come through private e-mails or on some social networking sites.  I’m glad the post helped a lot of you.  If there are other topics that you’d like covered—from business-related items to the personal, let me know.  Interaction will keep these posts fresh, and will provide you with what you need now, which is why I’m doing this online in the first place.

Second, please do share this blog with people who might be interested or with websites that might cater to freelancers.  You can either hit the Share button at the end of this post or you can direct people to the site using this link.  And if you’re feeling so inclined, please donate a few dollars to help me fund this project.  The Donate button is also at the bottom of the post.  You don’t have to have a PayPal account to use it.  You can use the credit cards listed around the button as well.

Now, onto a topic I’ve been threatening to cover for some time now: insurance. 

Before I get into the topic proper, I have to issue a disclaimer.  I am not an insurance expert.  I’m not an accountant.  I’m not a lawyer.  The advice given below is simply my opinion.  It’s an opinion based on decades of freelancing, and based on watching others freelance as well.

Here’s what I’ve observed.  Most failed freelance careers fail for four reasons. Let’s do this like a Late Show Top Ten List—backwards. 

The fourth reason freelance careers fail:  A lack of discipline on the part of the freelancer.

The third reason freelance careers fail: A lack of business savvy on the part of the freelancer.

The second reason freelance careers fail:  A lack of money management skills on the part of the freelancer.

And the main reason freelance careers fail:  A lack of insurance.

Now I know I have your attention, and I also know that most of you don’t believe me.  I don’t have statistics to back up these observations, although I’m sure I can find them.

What I do have are countless years of watching friends and other freelancers fall by the wayside.  I’ve also failed in a few freelance ventures myself, although never for lack of insurance.  Lack of money management skills—check:  that was the first time I tried to go freelance with my writing.  Lack of business savvy—check: that would be the art gallery I owned with my ex-husband.  Lack of discipline—oh, well, never mind.  I’ve never lacked for discipline.  Discipline is the one thing I’ve always had…when it comes to something I love.  If I hate something, I have no discipline at all.  But why start a business of any kind if you hate the work?

How does a lack of insurance tank a freelancer’s business?  Easy.  All it takes is one catastrophe.  Just one.  And most people don’t make it through life without at least one catastrophe.

My husband Dean Wesley Smith had a house fire as have several of our friends, including writer Len Wein and his wife photographer Christine Valada, who lost their home to fire just this year.  (If you want to help Len, creator of Wolverine and lots of other great comic characters rebuild the inventory of comics he wrote, go to  http://www.povonline.com/weinproject.htm) A lot of writers, artists, and musicians—all people I know—lost everything in Hurricane Katrina.  That doesn’t count the hundreds I didn’t know, including small business owners, who lost not just their homes, but their storefronts as well.

Several years ago, the brush fires in Oakland threatened many in the Bay Area’s science fiction community.  After the Northridge Earthquake, I flew to L.A. to help writer Harlan Ellison clean up his ruined home.  I heard firsthand from several other writer/artist/bookstore owners about their ruined businesses as well.

Then there are the lawsuits.  As my husband Dean—the guy who went to law school and quit during the last week of his third year so that he wouldn’t become an Idaho attorney—says every time some idiot files a suit for something dumb:  Anyone can sue anybody about anything.

The suit doesn’t have to be legitimate.  The filing of the suit will still equal legal fees for you, even if the judge throws the case out on day one.  Not to mention time lost and everything else. 

There are other legal problems you can face, from liability issues to stalking issues (if you become famous).  Right now, a well-known friend is trying to block someone who is posing as him on Twitter and posting egregious things. 

Liability issues happen whether you’re famous or not.  At a restaurant where I waitressed in high school, a little old lady slipped on a wet floor and broke her arm, then sued the restaurant for years for neglect and other things, even though the wet floor was clearly marked as wet (along with a big yellow CAUTION sign) and despite the fact that the restaurant’s insurance paid for her medical care.

Insurance is for the unexpected, the catastrophic, and the extremely expensive events life throws at you.  Even if you weren’t considering the freelance life, I’d urge you to get insurance. 

I learned early how few people actually get the insurance they need and how much lack of insurance costs them.  I rented apartments to students and low-income folk, most of whom told me they couldn’t afford the $8 per month (then) renters’ insurance.  The gamble that nothing will happen to you is huge.

Something will happen:  the key is surviving it.  And guaranteed, you’ll survive it better with a little money from insurance payments than you will with no money at all.

So here are the insurance items every freelancer needs:

Health Insurance.  You’ve seen me mention this before, but I can’t stress it enough.  You have no safety net if you don’t have health insurance.  Your business depends on you.  If you’re incapacitated, then your business doesn’t run at all.  Money stops coming in, and the savings you’ve built up will disappear.

It’s amazing how fast money disappears when you aren’t getting paid and you have to pay medical bills.  I had emergency gall bladder surgery five years ago, and my insurance paid about $30,000—much of it they had negotiated down from the sticker price.  I paid the deductible–$5000—and was happy to do so.

That surgery, which required tests, an ambulance ride to a bigger hospital (I live in a small town), and an overnight stay in that hospital, is considered bread-and-butter surgery—not all that hard, and not all that expensive.

I guided a friend through her breast cancer from diagnosis to reconstructive surgery, acting as her hospital partner.  I have no idea what that experience cost her and her insurance company, but I do know that $30,000 would have seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to her bill for days in the hospital, two major surgeries, three different surgeons, and tests, tests, tests.

Think you’re relatively healthy?  Good for you.  Exercise a lot?  Eat right? Take vitamins?  Even better.  Never been sick a day in your life?  Wonderful.

Get the damn insurance.

Why?

Runner’s World just ran an article on Matt Long, a New York fire fighter and Ironman triathlete who was in top physical condition…the day a bus hit him and dragged him (and his bike) along its undercarriage.  His excellent physical condition allowed him to survive the accident, but essentially every system in his body failed that day, not to mention the multiple broken bones, etc.  It’s been  years, and he’s just recovering.  (Runner’s World profiled him for a variety of reasons, not the least being he just ran in the New York City marathon.  This guy is nothing if not determined.  Check it out here.)

All he had done was ride his bike to work that day.  The bus driver, who was at fault, hit him while going around a corner.

And in that instant, Matt Long’s life was changed forever.

I’m sure you all know stories like that.  And stories like that are what insurance is for.  I don’t care if you’re twenty and just starting out, feeling marvelous, or if you’re sixty and have a mountain of pre-existing conditions.

Get health insurance.

Before you quit your day job, research health insurance.  If you have a spouse who can include you on her plan, then get added in.  Make sure the entire family is covered.  If you’re single or your spouse isn’t insured, then investigate every option.

By law, most employers are required to keep you on their group health plan for at least 18 months after you quit/get laid off/are fired.  That law, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act or COBRA, passed in 1985.  It was designed to make sure that no one lost coverage because they lost their job.  However, the moment you’re no longer employed, you must pay for that coverage, and it’s often hugely expensive.  (I’m told that there’s a provision in the stimulus bill that changes this for some people.  The information isn’t on COBRA’s public website, but it might be on the private part of the site.  Since I’m not in need of COBRA, I didn’t research this part.)

It’s based on the premium your employer paid.  As I wrote this article, I asked folks who’ve had experience with COBRA to let me know how much they paid per month, so I could give you a range.  The responses I got ranged from $400 for a healthy single thirty-year-old to $2000 for a family of five.  These numbers are per month, not per year.

COBRA is designed as temporary insurance—a bridge insurance to carry you from one job to another—not as a lifelong insurance.  If you can get health insurance through another group like AARP or an organization affiliated with your freelance business, then investigate those.

Most insurance that you buy on your own will be much cheaper than COBRA.  The key is to get the best price for the best coverage.  And that can be tricky.

And look at my tips on shopping for insurance below. 

But don’t make the jump to fulltime freelancing without health insurance.  

Home Owners or Renters Insurance.  You should have this regardless of whether you have a day job or not.  House fires happen.  Trees fall through walls.  In my small town a few years ago, some doofus drove his car off an overpass and the car landed on another guy’s house. 

Weird stuff happens.  Be prepared.

But when you work at home, a house fire or similar disaster means you’ll lose your place of residence and your place of business.  Make sure you’re covered.

Homeowners or renters insurance covers your place of residence.  Your stuff, essentially, everything you use for leisure and for living.  It does not cover business in the home.  We’ll get to that in a minute.

But here are a few tips:  Get a high deductible and pay for minor repairs yourself.  Insurance companies often jack rates on frequent users of the homeowners policy.  So if a tree branch cracks a window, pay for the repair out of your own pocket and don’t make a claim.

Take pictures or make a video of everything in the house at least once per year, and keep those pictures and/or that video off premise.  You’ll be glad you did, because you’ll never remember what you owned after the crisis happens.  The pictures are a great guide for doing an inventory, which the insurance company requires when you make a claim.

Get the appropriate insurance.  If you live in earthquake country, get earthquake insurance.  Yes, it’s expensive.  But it’s better than losing everything—and the insurance company will deny your claim if your house is destroyed in an earthquake and you don’t have that earthquake rider.

The same goes for flood insurance.  If you live in a flood plain (and so many people do), then spring for the very expensive flood insurance.  If flooding is a distinct possibility in your area—if you live near a river, near a beach, or in a place with severe wet storms—then get flood insurance.  Insurance companies hate to pay for water damage and will often deny anything they can pretend is water damage.  (See what happened after any of the hurricanes in the south, but particularly after Katrina.)

If you don’t know whether or not you live in a flood plain, research it.  Go to your county assessors office and ask.  Look at historical flood maps.  Plan that the 100-year-flood will happen next year.  To you.

Yes, you’re gambling some money that you will need the coverage.  Better to have coverage when the disaster hits than to say you wished you’d gotten that coverage.

Business Rider.  You’ll need a business rider on your homeowners or rental policy to cover office equipment and your home business.  For example, the computer that your kids use for games and homework gets covered in a disaster, but your work computer, the one that keeps the family in video games, won’t be covered at all without the business rider.

Unlike (say) flood insurance, a business rider is relatively inexpensive and is an essential part of a freelancer’s insurance package.

Liability insurance.  If you’re running a home business that requires clients to come to you—like a law office out of your garage or a photography studio in your basement—get liability insurance.  That way, when the innocent-looking old lady who slips on the stairs and cracks her rib decides to sue you for negligence, your insurance company will handle the claim.  All you have to do is file the forms.

Umbrella policy.  Get an overall umbrella policy to cover all sorts of disasters.  Have it start at a million dollars or five million or whatever is the limit on your other policies.  That way, you’re covered for catastrophic events, major lawsuits that run on and on for years, and other disasters that I can’t even foresee as I write this.

Business-specific policies.  I’ve listed the policies that a freelance writer needs because I am one and I’m familiar with what’s needed.  I added the liability insurance when we taught workshops at our home.  (We don’t teach at home any longer, having graduated to a marvelous old hotel in the same town.  Now the hotel handles the liability claims.)

Each business has specific needs, most of which I know nothing about.  Find out what your business needs as far as insurance is concerned, and buy it. 

Here’s the main rule on insurance:  Never skimp.  Buy exactly what you need or more.  Preferably more.  It’s better to be overinsured than underinsured.

Finally, here are a few tips on shopping for insurance.

First, don’t do it alone.  The Internet has provided a variety of tools for buying insurance without an agent.  Use those tools to research coverage.

Then talk to a series of insurance agents—not just one.  Ask a lot of questions. Find out what kind of coverage you need and how much it will cost.

Remember that many insurance agents work on commission, so they’re often just trying to sell you product.  Weed out the agents who are in the business only for the sale.

A lot of insurance agents love what they do and love the challenge of providing the best insurance possible for their clients.  This is the kind of agent you want.  You might end up with different agents for different kinds of insurance.  If that’s what you need, then that’s what you do.

You need the best coverage for you, not the best coverage for their commission.

The most expensive insurance isn’t always  the best, so make sure you do your research.

And know what you want.  Figure out how you want to live if disaster strikes.  If you suffer like Matt Long did, do you want long-term care or do you want to stay in your home?  Can your insurance cover the multimillions it took to care for him?  His could.  But a lot of health policies limit the insurance company’s liability to $1,000,000.  Often you need riders or umbrella cover to handle more than that.

Buy policies with the highest deductible that you can reasonably afford.  That way, your monthly bill will be cheaper. But make sure you can afford that deductible. 

Remember that you’re buying insurance for the occasion when disaster happens, not if disaster happens.  So one year, you’ll have to pay that deductible, like we did that year of my emergency gall bladder surgery.  It was a stretch, but we managed. 

Reassess your insurance coverage annually.  Things change.  You get older, your health gets worse (or better).  You change your business (like we did, moving our teaching outside the home).  You get new equipment that needs better coverage.  Your youngest kid graduates from college and has a full-time job with his own health insurance, so you no longer have to pay for his coverage.  And on and on and on.

Insurance protects you in tough times—if you have the right coverage.  So make sure your coverage is the best you can afford. 

And remember:  You must be able to afford insurance.  If you don’t have it, you’re gambling with your career, your family’s safety, and in some cases, their very lives.

I know a lot of you appreciate the guide.  You’ve written to me to tell me so.  I’m taking a gamble of my own as I write this without the safety net of a book advance.  Please help provide that safety net.  Every little bit helps.  Thanks.

A lot of people have asked where they can find “The Secret Lives of Cats.”  Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine has put the story online for the Anthony voting period.  You can find the entire story here.

Enjoy!

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide:  Staying Positive

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

It’s been three weeks since I stopped answering questions and in that time, the questions and the comments slowed down.  I think I scared everyone with what I called the bread and butter posts—giving a freelancer’s job description, figuring out when to quit your day job, and what you should have in place before you do.

I need to move onto more bread and butter topics—insurance, money, time schedules—and would love to hear which folks want covered first.

But this week, I’d dealing with some issues of my own, mostly to do with my office cat.  She has lived alone in my office for more than a decade because she doesn’t play well with others (tries, in fact, to kill anything with fur, including raccoons), and she’s been quite ill.  This week, we’ve finally decided it’s time to end her misery.

My office will never be the same.

I’m taking this opportunity to move my office to a new space, where I’ll have three office kitties, and even more privacy than I had before.  But it’s an emotional week for me, so I really didn’t want to discuss money.

Instead, I thought I’d answer two questions, both on emotions and freelancing.

The first, from writer Michael Samerdyke, inspired the title of this section.  He writes, “Will you include something on how to stay positive?”

Remaining positive sounds like such a minor thing.  Yet it is the key to everything.  Oddly enough, successful freelancers are the most cynical, hard-bitten optimists in the entire world.

We have to be.  Who would believe in us if we didn’t believe in ourselves?

No one discusses remaining positive at a day job, unless it is a requirement of that day job.  When I worked as a waitress, I had to smile at the customers and be nice.  It was in the job description.  The same rules applied, perhaps more stringently, at my very first retail job.  We had to be so incredibly nice at that store that we were required (again, as part of the job description) to wish each and every customer a very nice day.

This is not what I mean about positive.

You can grump around your home office for weeks if you want to.  You can snarl at the cable news channels, like I often do (particularly during an election cycle).  You declare a book useless and toss it across the room if you like without worrying about hitting one of your co-workers, since you no longer have any.

You can be the surliest, nastiest person on earth because you work alone.  If being surly and anti-social makes you happy, then by all means, have at it.

When you work alone, you don’t need rules for office behavior.  If you don’t receive clients in your office, like most freelancers, then you can behave anyway you want to.

Most freelancers don’t take this acting out very far.  Mostly they do a few cosmetic things they would never have done at the day job, like spend the entire day in sweats or in their pajamas.   Some don’t shower until they finish work.

Fine.  Good. Whatever.

I do dress in Northwest casual to go to my office.  I wear the clothes that I would wear to a restaurant or to the post office.  My mother believed that appearances mattered, and that part of my upbringing rubbed off.

In fact, something she said (repeatedly) actually stuck.  Dressing properly makes you feel better.   And you know something?  It does.  I don’t wear fancy clothes to the office because that feels ridiculous.  But I always feel underdressed and vaguely unhappy when I wear my grubbiest clothes.

Clothing sounds like a side issue, but it’s not.  It’s all a part of a greater whole.

As I’ve said before, a day job gives you structure.  It structures your time—when you’ll arrive, when you’ll leave, and what you’ll do while you’re there.  It structures your environment—someone else designs your workspace, and whether you get an office with a window or a cubicle with high carpeted walls.  It structures your appearance—you may have to wear a business suit or a uniform with the company logo.  Some places have strict rules about grooming.  Disneyland, for example, won’t allow men to have facial hair.  Many restaurants I worked in didn’t allow the waitstaff to wear perfume, cologne or use scented soaps because those odors would interfere with the food.

And then each day job, whether it’s acknowledged or not, structures the employee’s attitudes.  Some, like the retail shops I mentioned above, required positive attitudes at all times.  But most emotional structures are subtler than that.  Except for discussions of last night’s episode of Lost or some (tame) discussions of this year’s baseball season, personal conversation gets discouraged. 

If someone asks, “How are you today?” they really don’t want to know the answer.  They don’t want you to launch into a litany of your ills from your aching feet to the hangover that has lingered (been encouraged?) all weekend.  In fact, too much personal discussion can lead to reprimand and ultimately dismissal for inappropriate behavior.

You don’t have to be positive at these jobs, but you do have to maintain some sort of professional attitude.  You know once you get out of the car in the parking lot that you have to be on your best behavior until it’s time to drive home.

Now you work at home.  Home, where you express every feeling, where you stay when you’re sick, where you go for refuge.  Home has suddenly become work as well, and the lines have blurred.

We allowed those lines to blur long before we went fulltime freelance.  Before we quit our day jobs, we did our freelance work when we “felt like it” or when we “found the time” or when the muse showed up.

In the early days—for all of us—the freelance work was a side business or a hobby, something we did because we loved it or because it filled the time.

The day job, on the other hand, was something we did for the money.

Now we freelance for the money.  We forget that we used to do this sort of thing for fun.  Sometimes fulltime freelancing takes all the joy out of the operation.

The key isn’t so much recapturing that joy—remaining joyful day after day isn’t something most humans are capable of—but remembering the joy.  Remembering that you are doing the work that you love and you’re lucky to be doing so.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever gave one of my writing students was accidental.  He was so serious about his writing that every sentence had become torture.  I told him to go play.  The advice stuck.  He made a sign that said Go Play and put it across from his desk where he could see it every single day.

It didn’t put him in a good mood every day, but it did help him feel better about his freelancing.

Staying positive is tough for a variety of reasons.  I mentioned one in the essay on priorities.  People who spend the majority of their time alone are prone to depression.  Study after study has shown this.

The solutions are simple, but do take time away from the freelancing.  Some are basic: Get enough rest, eat good food (not junk food), and exercise.  In fact, a recent study showed that a half-hour run has the same effect on a person’s mood that a single dose of Valium has.  Plus the run is cheaper and has many other benefits.

You must also schedule time to be with other people, doing fun things.  This sounds silly, but many freelancers spend their free time with other freelancers, discussing business. Take the time to see a movie (the new Star Trek is good) or to go to the beach or take in a basketball game. 

People whose freelancing requires little more than a computer and a wi-fi connection can go to restaurants, libraries, and other places to get some work done.  One Christian writer I know spends every afternoon in a local restaurant, researching, writing, and going over his manuscripts.  He eats lunch, pays a little extra for his coffee, and socializes just enough to keep his mood elevated.

It works for him.  Sometimes that solution works for me too.

But the toughest part about staying positive has nothing to do with the lack of companionship or the right attitude.  It takes focus to remain optimistic.

First, you need confidence in your work.  Most of us don’t have it.  If pushed, we confess to all kinds of insecurities, problems, reasons why our work isn’t as good as it could possibly be.

Yet we need to believe in ourselves to do a good job.

What do I recommend?  Act like you have the confidence.  Eventually, you’ll improve in this area.   I learned this through theater training.  Traditional acting schools teach that if you mimic an emotion, you can actually bring that emotion out in yourself.

Think about that for a moment:  Before you started freelancing fulltime, you probably described  your emotional life as pretty balanced.  It had to be.  You had to maintain a professional decorum at your day job.

Then you quit that day job, spent all your time at home, and your emotions started running amuck.  You didn’t have to pretend any more.  You could be yourself—and yourself, like the rest of ourselves, is an emotional rollercoaster.

That rollercoaster is fine—and often good for those of us in the arts—but you have to be aware you’re riding it.  You need to assume that mask of professional decorum when dealing with the outside world.  You need to filter all the information from the outside world through the same professional mask.

If a new client doesn’t return a phone call on time, it’s not because the client hates you.  It’s because the client didn’t have time to get to the phone that day or forgot or something equally silly.  But we lose track of that when we work at home, for ourselves, with no one to balance us.

Work to retain your optimism.  You quit your day job because you believed you could succeed as a freelancer.  You need to remember that each and every day.  If that means putting a sign up in your office that says Believe in yourself!, then do it.  Who’ll see the little aphorisms you post around your desk?  You’re not in someone else’s building any more.  Your office is private, so design it in a way that keeps you motivated and happy.

That includes things like music.  Or an excellent view.  Or a great screen saver.  (I have one that makes me smile, no matter what.)  I keep a cartoon-a-day calendar, and read it every day, which also helps, believe it or not.

But the most important part of staying positive is to remain realistic.  If forty-five people say something nice to us and one person says something mean, we’ll remember the something mean and discount the nice things. 

As freelancers, we have to keep track of the good and the bad.   And we have to give them the proper weight.  Teaching reminds me how to weight the things around me. As I explain things to my writing students, I realize the things I’ve overlooked in my own life.

However, I do work hard to remain realistic.  My first and best tool for this is my calendar.  I have a New Yorker desk calendar, encased in leather and embossed with my name, at my right hand, just past my computer’s mouse. 

I write every single good thing that happens to me in a day on that calendar.  I keep track of fan mail, covers, publications, awards, and the amount of money I receive. 

I think getting paid for my work is a good and positive thing.  Rather than relegate it all to the accounting program, I also keep track in my calendar. 

I also keep track of good comments, even from people who have rejected my work. 

People who work for themselves have trouble keeping track of time.  First-time freelancers soon learn that they can’t tell Thursday from Tuesday without help.  Even if you take the weekends off, the weekdays seem remarkably the same.

The good things that happen to you will seem far in the distance, even if they happened a week ago. The bad things, conversely, will seem like they happen every day, even if the last one happened a month before.  Remember that we focus on the bad and often forget the good.

So on bad days, I go back through my calendar, and look at all the good things that have happened.  It helps me maintain perspective.

I do realize that some professions don’t have the regular positive feedback that my job does.  Some people work for years on the same project, or they do healing work (like massage or psychotherapy) that often has no real end to it, or they work in professions with no real feedback at all.

How do you stay positive in jobs like that?

The same way you remain positive when you’re just starting your business and have no real sticks to measure success with.

You have to learn how to measure success from within, not from the outside.  In other words, set daily goals and reward yourself for achieving them.

The daily goals must be realistic.  They can’t be too easy or you’ll finish in an hour and feel like you haven’t worked.  On the other hand, they can’t be too hard or you’ll never achieve them and will always feel discouraged.  You must set a goal that makes you put in some effort and gives you a good result at the same time.

Writers generally set a word limit—writing so many words of new material each and every day.  Musicians often set a time limit—practicing for so many hours each and every day.  EBay sellers will often set a goal of making a certain number of listings each and every day.

The type of goal will vary from business to business, but it must be something that you can achieve daily.  I also set weekly goals and monthly goals.  Even though I’m very structured, I usually miss my monthly goals—something gets in the way or goes long or (as in this week) life intrudes a bit and puts me behind.

Sometimes I miss my weekly goals as well due to illness or some other interruption.  But I rarely miss my daily goals.  But I still reward myself for achieving them.  The rewards are small—an extra hour of television that night or a brand-new paperback book or just a simple pat on the back.  I mark that success in my calendar, so that I can look back on bad days and say, “Well, at least I achieved my goals in the past week.”

Sometimes that’s all I need.

The other aspect to being realistic is to know your limitations.  During the same week that Michael Samerdyke asked his question, Laura Ware asked something similar.  Laura, a Florida columnist and freelance fiction writer, has had life intrude on her work in a very big way. 

She has become the fulltime caretaker for her very ill elderly in-laws.  With the help of her family and an occasional visit from home health care services, she tends to her in-laws seven days per week.  But Laura is determined to continue with her freelance work in the middle of all of this.

She asks, “When you’re in the kind of place [that I’m in], how do you know what’s slacking, what’s too much, and what’s appropriate?”

That’s a very healthy question. Because if you set your goals too high, you’ll feel bad.  People whose lives have intruded on their work (not just freelancers, but everyone) suffer a lot of stress.  Whether taking care of elderly parents or taking care of a newborn baby, things happen in all of our lives that cause stress and an additional burden (even if, in the case of the baby, it’s a burden that we want).

What we have to do is, again, be realistic.  If you’re the sole breadwinner for your family, you can’t drastically cutback your hours.  You may have to hire outside help or work with other family members so that they can share some of the burden.

But if you’re not yet a major breadwinner, if part of the condition that the family imposed on you quitting your day job was to be the stay-at-home parent or to take care of the elderly parents or, in the case of a friend of mine, to be the sole caretaker of a dying spouse, then you must shave your work goals accordingly.

You need to figure out when you can steal the hours to get work done and if you’ll be in any shape to do the work when those hours happen.  If you’re under a great deal of stress, like Laura is, cutting back on sleep is a terrible idea.  If you’re just overwhelmed with car pooling and running errands, you might have to change your work habits by figuring out what parts of your job you can do on the run.

In Laura’s e-mail, she adds this, “I’m tapping this out on my phone while sitting in a waiting room with my mother-in-law (she has a doctor’s appointment).  After I send this, I’ll fire up my laptop and try to get something done while I sit around.”

Laura is one of the hardest workers I know.  (Check out her blog here and her columns here.) She gets a lot done while caring for her family.  She’s organized and driven, and unwilling to give up her dreams, even though she’s in a tough spot right now.  She routinely writes five hundred words per day, which is a great deal given her situation. 

Yet, as her question says, she feels like she’s not doing enough.

So let’s take the question bit by bit:  How do you know what’s slacking?

I think we all know deep down when we’re not working hard enough.  If we’re spending most of our time watching television or playing video games, we’re not working hard enough.  Some people compare themselves to other freelancers, and think, I should be working as hard as they are. That’s not the answer either, because everyone is in a different circumstance.

Know your circumstance, know what you’re capable of, and then make a realistic assessment of your life.  Try to achieve your new daily goal for a week.  If you never reach the goal, figure out if the problem is that you weren’t putting in enough time, that you didn’t have enough time to give (as in Laura’s case), or if the goal is just too hard to achieve in a single day for you.

Then set a new goal and try that for a week.  Work until you find one you have to stretch just a little to achieve, but make sure it is one you can achieve.  When you’re ill or taking care of something in your life that takes precedence (like sickly elderly parents), then you might have to cut back on your daily goals.  When you’re in excellent physical shape with no distractions in your life, raise your goals.  Don’t set anything in concrete.  Be flexible, but realistic.

If you can achieve your daily goal in fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the day goofing off, you’re slacking.  In this case, you need to measure how much leisure time you have.  If you’re spending too much time recreating, and not enough creating, you’re slacking.

The next part of her question:  What’s too much?

If you have no leisure time, if you’re getting repetitive stress injuries, if the people around you whom you trust start telling you forcefully that you need time off, then you are working too much.  In the last two years of our publishing company, our friends started handing Dean articles on stress management.  He was putting in 20 hours per day, seven days per week, and it showed.  Eventually he collapsed, and no one was surprised, except him.

He’s learned how to moderate, although he doesn’t like it much.  I’ve learned that he still works harder than anyone else I know.  But now he’s working a more sensible schedule (10-12 hours per day, with one weekday evening and one full day per week off), and getting  8 hours of sleep per night.  He occasionally thinks he’s slacking, but no one gives him articles on stress management any more. 

And the final part of Laura’s question:  What’s appropriate?

Appropriate is an interesting word, because it implies that there are Standards To Be Met.

The cool thing about being a freelancer is that you set your own standards.  What’s appropriate for me, a person with few responsibilities and a long-term career with several obligations, isn’t appropriate for Laura or for anyone else reading this. 

So let’s rephrase the question in a way that Goldilocks and the Three Bears would understand:  What’s just right?

Just right changes.  Just right may be 500 words per day because you’re taking five minutes here and five minutes there.  Just right might be 5,000 words per day because you have no other obligations or 8,000 words per day because you waited too long to start that book under deadline.

For a therapist friend of mine, four days of client meetings per week was just right.  It kept her fresh for her patients.  She was able to maintain her emotional balance at four days, with three day weekends to recharge.  She figured out how many patients she could reasonably handle, how many she could help, and how many would drain her.  And she picked the answer that allowed her to remain healthy and to do the work that helped the clients that she had.

Once you’ve figured out what’s just right for you, then make a note of it. Set it up as a goal to be reassessed when the current situation changes.  Then strive to meet that goal every single day.

And reward yourself for doing so.

Early on in your freelance career, the only good things will be subtle ones—meeting your daily goal and enjoying the work that you quit your day job to do. 

The best way to remain positive is to remind yourself that you’re now doing the work you love, day in and day out.  Most people aren’t that lucky.  Most people never get the chance to do what they love.

You have taken that opportunity.

Enjoy it, and value it for what it is—something special.  Something worthwhile.

An achievement, in and of itself.

Please send me more questions and help me shape the Freelancer’s Guide.  As I work on this, I do set aside my paying freelance work, so I would appreciate any funds (however small) that you can donate to help me continue this work. In addition, please let friends, colleagues, and any business sites that focus on freelancers or the self-employed know about this project.  They can find the entire guide at here.  Thanks.

I’m really pleased to announce that my story, “The Secret Lives of Cats,” has just been nominated for an Anthony Award, given by the readers and fans at the big mystery convention, Bouchercon.  It’s quite an honor, and I’m very pleased.

You can find the full list of nominees here at the Bouchercon website.  There are some wonderful books and stories on that list, including a fun novel by my friend Julie Hyzy.  Check it out.