Even though the publication date says late November, Diving into the Wreck is available now.  You can purchase copies at various places, from Amazon.com to specialty bookstores to the chains.

I have a few requests for my readers.

First, please have your favorite bookstore–one that is carrying Diving–send me contact information, including addresses (both web and brick & mortar).  I’m setting up a special page just for ordering, and I want to include as many specialty bookshops as possible.

Second, I’m designing a website just for Diving. Let me know (privately or in the comments section) what you would like to see.

Third (but most important), if you plan to get a copy of the book, please do so within the next two weeks. In these tough economic times, my publisher wants to see sales figures before committing to the next book. (The publisher has already been great–buying the first in the height of the recession.) So the sales figures for the first two weeks of November are crucial.

Thanks, y’all. Enjoy the book!

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Success Part Four

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This morning’s Washington Post had an article that encapsulates much of what I’ve been discussing in the Success sections of the Freelancer’s Guide. The article from the front page of the October 28, 2009, edition is about farmer, fish taxidermist, and wildlife artist, Robert Bealle.

Bealle has just won the Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest, which is the only art contest sponsored by the federal government. I’m quite familiar with the contest due to one of my past lives—when my ex-husband and I owned the art gallery, a regular customer bought the limited edition lithographs from the contest every year. He had my ex frame them, along with the postage stamp featuring the art.

Over the years, I gained quite an appreciation for wildlife art and for duck art in particular. Even now, I can spout off the names of major duck artists and give you approximate years in which they won the competition—up to about 1985, when we closed the store.

So I read the article with great interest and found not just something about a bit of my own past (and past interests) but about this series as well.

Bealle has entered the contest every year since 1982. He’s been a finalist several times, even coming in second more than once. His work has won the Maryland Duck Stamp competition three times. But he never achieved his dream, which was to win the Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest. Until this year.

He told the Post: “Now I’ll always be referred to as a Federal Duck Stamp winner. It may not mean a lot to most people, but to me it means a hell of a lot.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the definition of success I’ve been working toward.

It may not mean a lot to most people, but to me it means a hell of a lot.

Note how much work it told me to explain the contest to you. And I can’t begin to express how much that contest art meant to the collector I knew twenty-five years ago. He waited for the announcement, put his order in for the first of the lithographs, always hoping to get one of the top ten signed and numbered pieces, and always brought the litho in with great pride the day it arrived. He wasn’t an artist; he was a connoisseur. And if he’s still alive today (I lost touch when the store closed), you can bet he’s already tried to put in an order for Bealle’s work.

It may not mean a lot to most people, but to me it means a hell of a lot.

That definition sound so simple, doesn’t it? So easy, so perfect. You’d think, if you loved a person who can so clearly define what success is to him, that you’d understand when he achieved it. You’d be there, you’d be sympathetic, you’d celebrate.

But you might not.

Because life just isn’t that simple—and everyone has their own definition of success. With that definition comes expectations.

Most Americans equate success with wealth and fame. Go back to the dictionary definitions I quoted in Success Part One. Then take a look at the comments section. Mary quotes the definition of success from her French dictionary. It’s quite different from the American definition.

Let’s take a fictional couple, Frieda and Ron. Ron defines success the way Bealle does—as winning the Federal Duck Stamp Contest. Frieda supports him in his art, year in and year out. She works at a corporate job, making a good salary that doesn’t pay all of the bills, and certainly won’t cover their two kids’ college educations.

Ron works outside jobs to pay for his wildlife art. He’s had showings in several galleries and has had some regional success. He has made some money, enough to supplement his part-time job, but never more than $15,000 per year before taxes.

Then he wins the contest.

Here’s what Bob Dumaine, a Houston stamp dealer and founder of the National Duck Stamp Collectors Society, told the Post about the financial realities of the contest.

“The enterprising people make money at it. The ones sitting around waiting for the cash register to ring, they’re still waiting.”

So much to parse in those two sentences. First, clearly, the winner isn’t guaranteed a fortune. The winner doesn’t even get national recognition outside of wildlife art and duck stamp circles.

Then Dumaine goes on to say that the “enterprising people” make “money” at it. Which begs the question: How much money? What’s his definition of “making money”? Does he mean that they make a couple of thousand dollars or tens of thousands of dollars? Does he mean they make a fortune?

It’s impossible to tell from that one quote.

The one thing you can tell from the quote is that even with the win, the artist hasn’t been anointed with the brush of fame and wealth. The enterprising artist—in other words, the artist who works the business side—will earn more than the artist who thinks he’s given a map to Easy Street.

After 27 years in the competition, I’m assuming Bealle knows this, and I’m pulling for him to be one of those enterprising artists, even though, as of last night, I had no idea who he was.

But let’s take our fictional guy, Ron. Let’s say he doesn’t know how hard it is to make money after winning the contest. Or let’s say that success doesn’t include money at all to him. He just wanted to have a federal duck stamp with his artwork on it. That’s the extent of his dream.

If he and Frieda are like most couples, they discussed the win as success, but never discussed what that success meant. Ron’s ecstatic because he’s achieved his dream. Frieda’s a bit peeved because she realizes—for the first time—that the winner gets no money at all. Just a framed pane of 20 duck stamps signed by the Interior Secretary (and the artwork on 3.1 million duck stamps).

Ron’s happy with the win.

Frieda’s furious.

Where’s the money? Where’s the instant riches? Where’s the payoff for all those decades of hard work on her part, supporting her man in his dream?

What does she get, after all? Attendance at a ceremony. A few evenings at some gallery openings. Long conversations with other spouses about life with duck stamp artists.

And that’s about it.

Except the joy of seeing her husband achieve one of his lifelong ambitions.

For some spouses, that’s enough. But for many, it’s not. And it doesn’t have to be a duck stamp contest. It could be an athletic event—finishing a first ultramarathon for example (or a first marathon for that matter)—or a short story sale.

It could be a fan letter from someone you admire or a simple pat on the back from a mentor. For you, the freelancer, such things are so important that they can keep you going for days, months, sometimes years.

For the long-suffering spouse, they’re just one more indication of your weird obsession with duck art or writing or building filing cabinets.

Those small indications are important, because they build. At some point, Frieda realizes that she’ll always have to work her corporate job, that she’ll never live in the manner to which she can become accustomed (unless she’s the one who finds a new job, or a better way to earn money). At some point, she realizes that Ron will be content with his “little paintings” as she calls them, and could live in a hut in the woods, so long as he has food, electricity, and enough money at the end of the day to buy more painting supplies.

This, she will eventually say, is not what she signed on for and she will leave. She will sound unreasonable to all of Ron’s artist friends, but in reality, she’s right.

Because she and Ron never discussed what success means to both of them. She signed on to support an artist who eventually becomes as rich as Owen J. Gromme [who? You ask…only the most successful wildlife painter of his day—see how specialized success can be?]. Ron signed on to have a partner in his work, one who celebrates the 20-panel framed stamps signed by the Interior Secretary of the United States with as much vigor as she would a fifty-thousand dollar commission from a local art collector.

Success is wonderful, but it can be a minefield. When you achieve a certain level of success, you will lose friends—some of whom can’t deal with the fact that you achieved your dream before they achieved theirs. You will gain family members who believe that you owe them something, even though you had no idea that your Aunt Millie’s second cousin’s third wife had grown children. (Let alone that your Aunt Millie had a second cousin who had married three separate times.)

And you will run into some fascinating expectations, often from unexpected quarters.

After I quit editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the late 1990s, I wrote a variety of novels under many pen names. I am a fast writer who loves to write. I also like the “security” of a contract, and I like the challenge of unrelated projects.

I was making a healthy living as a writer in those years and was beginning to make a name for myself in my various genres. Then my agent at the time got the idea that I should not take advances under $15,000. We did not discuss this. The agent simply informed companies who wanted to work with me that my bottom line price was $15,000 per project.

I don’t know how long this went on before I stopped it. I have no idea how many projects I lost or how much goodwill that agent ruined for me. Because everyone who contacted the agent thought the agent was speaking for me—as agents are supposed to do.

When I confronted the agent as to the reason for this, it turns out we had a two-fold misunderstanding. First, I had said about one project and one particular company that I wouldn’t work for them for under $15,000 (see the mention of the Pain in the Ass Tax in earlier sections—this company was getting the tax). Second, the agent figured I was successful now, and needed to be “protected” from the “quick, easy, hack work” I had done before.

Never mind that I loved the “hack work” and didn’t consider it hack work at all. Never mind that I never asked for protection.

Later, I learned that this agent saw it as part of the business to protect the client’s reputation—as the agent saw the reputation. The reputation, according to the agent, was the only thing that constituted success.

My definition of success was completely different. I wanted steady, challenging work in a variety of fields so that my hummingbird brain wouldn’t get bored. I didn’t give a rat’s farty behind about reputation. I figured (and still believe) that reputation happened to you after you died. The only reputation I didn’t want was as a rude and difficult writer, someone perennially hard to work with.

Knowing that, a good friend of mine who was an editor at one of the publishing houses who had just been informed that I wouldn’t work for less than $15,000 called me and asked what was up. Because she had a hunch that the edict hadn’t come from me—and she was right.

But she made that leap because she’d had this problem with the agent before with other clients and because she knew me really, really well.

It was that friend’s action, that friend who understood how I worked and what I had repeatedly said constituted success for me, that stopped the weird little $15,000 downward spiral my career had slid into.

Such an edict might work well for other writers. It doesn’t work well for me. Sometimes the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever worked on paid less up front. Often I got a huge return in royalties later. Or a better project from the same company. Or a hundred free research books (that was lovely—worth another $2000 right there). Or a great piece of art.

Late one night, I channel surfed to PBS and caught an episode of Charlie Rose. He was interviewing John Grisham at New York City’s big Barnes and Noble store, just as The Associate was being released.

It’s a fascinating interview, because Rose is a major reader with attitudes about art and artists that are diametrically opposed to Grisham’s. Grisham writes to entertain. He makes no bones about that. He’s doing his job when millions of people use his work as escape from their daily lives.

He stated one of his mantras to Rose, something I’d heard Grisham say countless times before. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, If I get good reviews, I worry that I’m doing something wrong.

Grisham’s point is a simple one: that critics often don’t understand popular fiction. It’s taken me a long time to understand this phenomenon and it wasn’t until recently that it’s made sense to me. Critics are required to read things they don’t want to read. Worse, they’re required to read a lot of stuff. And even worse, they’re reading it for their job, not for enjoyment.

So if something breaks through the attitudes that the critic brings to the work [which are 1) I don’t want to read this and 2) I hate this kind of fiction and 3) this better be worth the time I have to spend at it], then the critic likes the work.

That’s a completely different attitude than the average reader brings to a book. The reader wants a few hours away from every day life, a few hours filled with entertainment, a few hours of escape.

Escape doesn’t hold up well to critical analysis.

Grisham mentioned a variation of this in passing to Rose, but Rose still didn’t understand. He values good reviews and critical opinion so much that he didn’t seem able to envision a writer having success without it. In fact, he wondered aloud in the interview (more than once) how Grisham managed to have a career without critical approbation.

Grisham in turn wondered why anyone would want it.

If you want to see two competing versions of success, unable to talk to each other past a superficial level, watch that middle section of the interview.

So how does all of this apply to you, the newly successful freelancer?

•Realize that some people will never understand your definition of success. Then it’s up to you whether or not to share your good news or to even discuss your success with them.

•Make sure that you know how the people closest to you define success. Make sure they know how you define it. Make certain you discuss the future, not just achieving the success but what that achievement means.

•Remember that the world really doesn’t care about your success. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to the world celebrating a success was last November, when Barack Obama was elected. People around the world danced in the streets. Yet millions of people in the United States and elsewhere were dismayed at the victory. What many saw as a huge success, others saw as a huge defeat. Days later, we all remembered that victory, but we all went back to our everyday lives. Many of us never spoke of it again. Yes, it was a big deal (and it was a very big deal for the Obama family [but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the Obama girls realized they had to leave their school and friends for the next four years]), but it wasn’t as important to most of us as our own jobs, our own families, and our own lives.

If you remember that no one cares as much about your successes (and your failures) as you do, then you’ll keep a personal balance, one that will enable you to get through some of the treacheries that success can bring—some of those things George Harrison alluded to when he said he felt sorry for Elvis Presley [see last week’s post, Success Part Three].

I still have a few more things to discuss related to success and because of it, I’m going to give you some homework. The next time you hear “The Climb” sung by Miley Cyrus (and I don’t know how you can miss it, given that it’s all over the airwaves but if you do miss it, check it out here), listen to the lyrics. I’ll be examining that very topic the songwriter (clearly not the young Ms. Cyrus) brings up in that catchy tune.

I received lots of good verbal support on the Freelancer’s Guide during my weeks “away.” And I appreciate the welcome home that came in the form of donations and great posts. I’m glad this means so much to y’all. Clearly, I’m ahead of the curve on this: the business publications have just started printing articles on how to freelance in this down economy, and there were even some articles in various Sunday papers last week. This is one of those projects that my former agent wouldn’t have believed in. I didn’t make any money up front, and what I do get, I get directly from you. But I think the project benefits all of us. So thanks for the support and the good wishes. They mean a lot.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Success Part Four” copyright 2009 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I’ve been doing a lot of nonfiction reading this month as I research a few large (and thankfully related) projects. I’m astonished at two things: 1) the lack of scholarship in some popular histories and 2)the lack of entertainment value in some scholarly histories. I just read one scholarly tome about the biggest pre-Madoff scandal in the U.S. in which four of the principles get murdered and the rest eventually commit suicide—and the damn thing was dull. I’m still a bit astonished about that.

September, 2009

Baxter, Stephen, “Turing’s Apples,” The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martins Press, 2009. A wonderful story about a successful search for extraterrestrials. Creepy and plausible, this one will haunt you.

Carriger, Gail, Soulless:An Alexia Tarabotti Novel, Orbit, 2009. This is a marvelous first novel. The cover attracted me as did the tag line: “A novel of vampires, werewolves, and parasols.” I’m beginning to think vampires and werewolves overdone, so it took quite a bit for me to pick this up—including the wonderful opening paragraph with ends with this: “She had retreated to the library, her favorite sanctuary in any house, only to happen upon an unexpected vampire.”

As if there are expected vampires. As if vampires were nothing more than an annoyance.

Of course, in Carriger’s world, there are expected vampires as well as other creatures of the dark. The worldbuilding here is lovely, as are the characters. Essentially, the tone and voice of this novel belong in a regency, even though the book is set in the Victorian era. It’s almost as if Georgette Heyer wrote urban fantasy. Laugh out loud funny, this novel is worth every minute of your time.

Child, Lee, One Shot, Dell, 2006. The Lee Child binge continues. Looks like I’ll keep reading until I catch up on the entire series.

Like so many books marketed as thrillers, this one has an utterly unforgettable title. In fact, I was going to write about this book last night, but couldn’t remember the title at all—and I was going to mention it in a tweet today about crime novels set in Indianapolis, where Bouchercon will be this year—and didn’t have time to look up the book. So. Never happened. Ah, well.

The book is wonderful, aside from the crummy title. A nice hook, an even better reason for our hero, Reacher (third person this time), to come onto the scene. Some nice twists and surprises, and a real sense of Indianapolis, where I’ve been going on and off since I was a child. (My brother has lived in Indiana since the 1960s.) I learned stuff I didn’t know about a city I thought I’d seen, which was nice. It made me a little happier that I’m going to Indianapolis in October (although I’d rather go to Paris [wouldn’t we all?]). I simply hope I don’t get in the middle of a mass murder case, like Reacher does. Worth reading.

Crais, Robert, The First Rule, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010. Robert Crais and I have a lot of mutual friends, and he dedicated The First Rule to one of them: Harlan Ellison. I thought that an appropriate dedication for a Joe Pike novel, since Pike is the toughest of Bob’s characters and yet has the truest heart.

We see a lot of Pike’s layers in The First Rule. One of Pike’s old friends gets murdered, and Pike has to solve the case, mostly on his own. He runs into the Russian mob and human trafficking and some very nasty gun runners. At first, I was a bit disappointed: I thought Bob had taken what could be an Elvis Cole novel and gave it to Pike.

Then I got to the twist. Ah, the twist. The twist gives the book heart, the twist made me cry at the end. The twist makes this a classic Bob Crais novel and a marvelous Joe Pike story. I won’t spoil it for any of you, since I got an advanced copy. But let me simply say this spare book with its emotionally reserved main character is one of the most moving novels I’ve read this year.

Creighton, Joanne Vanish, “Reflections on Joyce Carol Oates,” On Wisconsin, Summer, 2009. Joyce Carol Oates got her masters degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The lovely male brains heading the graduate committee refused to make her a PhD candidate. This was 1961, where the men were startled (according to Oates [and I believe it]) that a married woman wanted to continue her education.

I had known that Oates had graduated from the UW. (So, I learned from this issue of the alumni magazine, did Peter Straub and Michael Mann.) I first met her there in the early 1980s when she got an honorary degree on the same night one of my closest friends graduated from law school. But I didn’t know about the difficult time she had at the university, and how much that influenced her later on. Creighton wrote the biographical article, but On Wisconsin also excerpted an essay Oates wrote about the entire experience, which I’ll deal with below.

Friedman, Steve, “The Longing,” Runner’s World, July 2009. Okay, this is a first for me. A nonfiction profile written in the second person. Yep, you read that right. The second person. For those of you who have forgotten high school English (or never covered that concept), second person is written from the point of view of “you.” If I wrote the opening line of this recommendation in second person, it would go like this: This is a first for you. You’ve never read a magazine profile written in the second person. You weren’t even sure it could be done, let alone done well. And so on.

I’d left the issue lying around, and Dean glanced at the opening line. He said, “Why the hell would anyone write a piece like that?” Why indeed? The second person turned him off. It made me curious.

I’m glad I read it. The profile broke my heart (in a good way) and wouldn’t have been at all effective in third person. Check this out—both for the innovative writing and the fascinating woman it profiles.

Kosmatka, Ted, “N-Words,” The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martins Press, 2009. An excellent short story about prejudice. The n-word here is Neandertal, which some enterprising scientists managed to bring back as a viable species. Heartbreaking and to the point, this is a do-not-miss short story.

Oates, Joyce Carol, “Nighthawk,” excerpted in On Wisconsin, Summer, 2009. Full essay @ http://jco.usfca.edu/ray/nighthawk.html .As I mentioned above, this essay is just an excerpt from a larger piece, published in the Yale Review in 2001. I read the excerpt and loved it. Then I searched for the entire piece and found it online.

Oates deals frankly with something she sees as a personal failure—her inability to qualify as a PhD candidate in 1961. She talks about its impact on her career and on her own emotional state. (Those of you who read my three posts on setbacks might want to look at this essay.) As an FYI for those of you who don’t know, she went on to teach at Princeton and has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize.

She wrote this essay in 1999, in Madison, when she returned to receive yet another honor (unnamed in the essay) from the university. She writes, “Honored at the age of sixty-one as an indirect (and yet irrefutable) consequence of having failed at the age of twenty-two!”

Ironic, yes, but she looks below the irony at the pain, humiliation, and understanding that comes from failure, the path it leads us down, and how we respond to it. This is an incredibly powerful piece, made more powerful by the fact that Oates rarely writes personal essays.

And a side note here: She writes of the honorary degree the university gave her in the 1980s. This part is in the full essay, not the excerpt. As I mentioned above, I was there that night, and forced my shy self over to meet her. She shook my hand, but said little, and I, embarrassed, moved onto congratulate my friend on his graduation.

But Oates was going through her own difficulties that night. She writes, “…I returned to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to be given an ‘honorary doctorate of humane letters’ in an elaborate commencement ceremony, the occasion would seem surreal to me; I couldn’t help brooding on the irony of the situation, and perhaps the perversity, hearing my name amid those of other ‘distinguished alumni….’”

I knew none of this, of course. I do remember the ceremony vividly—it was elaborate (and long) and had an impact on me, even though I didn’t graduate that night. In addition to Oates, one of the other recipients was Meredith Wilson who wrote The Music Man. He talked of his Midwestern heritage and how it influenced all that he wrote. I watched both Oates and Wilson, and hoped I could do half of what they had done so far.

So I was admiring her and her achievements, and she was reflecting on the past, in a place that made her think of failure. This is a prime example, to me, of the way in which others’ perceptions of us are so very different from our own.

Read this essay. Of course, you’ll have a different reaction to it—most of you never went to the UW (it strikes me as appropriate that the one place she found comfort is a place all students seem to find comfort at the UW, on the Union Terrace). But anyone who reads this piece will sense the power in it, and perhaps find a bit of hope for themselves.

Reynolds, Alastair, “The Six Directions of Space,” The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martins Press, 2009. I thought about this story for days after I finished it. So many concepts combined with a whiz-bang plot and some marvelous characters. I’m glad space opera has come back into fashion—and that Reynolds is one of its chief practitioners.

Wendell, Sarah & Tan, Cindy, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, Fireside, 2009. For those of you who read romances and aren’t at least glancing at Tan and Wendell’s blog, www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com, remedy that now! They write great, insightful work about romances, out of love and affection, but with a whole lot of snark.

They know how ridiculous it is to sit in public and read a book with someone undressing someone else on the cover, and yet still expect to be taken seriously. They explain the covers, discuss trends, look at the history of romance, and take on the controversies. They’ve even started a few controversies themselves.

If you’ve never read romance, pick up this book as an introduction. They list writers they like and why. They talk about what’s good and what’s bad, and why bad is sometimes good. As a romance reader, I love this. As a science fiction and mystery reader, I wish someone would do this for those genres. But it won’t be me. I don’t have the cast-iron balls that Wendell and Tan do. But I sure can enjoy reading everything they write.

While I was teaching and traveling, a few stories of mine got published. (Yay!) I’ll post information about them over the next week. Here’s the first, “Year of the Rat,” in an anthology of stories about, of all things, intelligent design. There are many good stories in here, including one by Dean. Enjoy!

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Success Part Three

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I wrote the last part of last week’s post and all of this week’s post during the Master Class. Dean and I teach a Master Class for professional writers who have plateaued in their careers. It’s a two-week boot camp that’s as hard on the three main instructors (me, Dean, and Loren Coleman) as it is on the students. I knew I wouldn’t have a long dedicated period of time to write these posts during the class. Fortunately, I’m finding half an hour here and half an hour there to work ahead. This post will go live during my catatonic week (after the Master Class and Bouchercon and the jetlag of going to the East Coast and catching a flight home at 6 a.m. Indiana time), so I knew I didn’t have to finish it before I left, but I also knew it would be better to write it while I still thought in English instead of in Kris’s version of English While Exhausted—which isn’t even readable to me, most of the time.

During these weeks of hard work and little sleep, I’m also carving out time to exercise (a needed stress reliever). Yesterday (as I write this; two weeks ago Tuesday as you read it), I got on the elliptical because I only had twenty minutes and, as I exercised, watched a section of The Beatles Anthology Part One.

And guess what this section was about?

It was about success.

The Beatles Anthology, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is a 1995 documentary about the Beatles using their own words. The words come from some live interviews from 1995 and some old interviews from various time periods. It’s a fascinating study of a musical phenomenon, and I recommend that you watch it.

I’m watching whenever I have to exercise indoors. The segment I watched yesterday was about 1963, as the Beatles were becoming superstars and Beatlemania was sweeping through England. (They hadn’t become a phenomenon in the United States yet.) In that section, the four members of the Beatles started discussing success. They mentioned how sudden it is, how surreal it is, how hard it is, and how they coped (or didn’t).

In a 1963 interview, George Harrison actually said that he didn’t believe the “George Harrison” in the newspapers was him. He was coping, at the time, by distancing himself from the entire event. The other two Beatles mentioned how difficult it had suddenly become to walk down the street in London or in Liverpool.

John Lennon, in that same interview, said this, “It all sounds complaining [but] we’re not….It affects your home world more than it does yourself because you know what to expect but your parents and family, they don’t know what’s happening.”

I’ve never heard the phenomenon of becoming extremely successful described so accurately. What he said in a few words is what I’ve been trying to express in the last few posts.

I’ll get back to this inside/outside approach to success in a moment, but let me continue with the Beatles Anthology for a minute.

In some ways, George Harrison’s 1995 take on the entire phenomenon that he and the other Beatles lived through in 1963 was the most interesting. Harrison, speaking from a distance of 32 years, as an older man instead of the 20-something he had been when superstardom got thrust upon him, clearly had had a lot of time to reflect on that period of his life.

In his interview for the Anthology, he said, “I always felt sorry, later, for Elvis because he was on his own. He had his guys with him, but there was only one Elvis. Nobody else knew what he felt like. But for us, we all shared the experience.”

Let me repeat. He felt sorry for Elvis. Elvis Presley, also a superstar, a man who had achieved his dreams. Most people would never feel sorry for Elvis, not in the way Harrison had felt sorry for him, because most people would have told Elvis how lucky he had been to be in that situation.

Everyone who has incredible success understands that they are fortunate to be in that situation. (Note I didn’t say lucky. As my very successful friend, Kevin J. Anderson, repeatedly says, “The harder I work, the luckier I am.” Successful people may have had luck, but they are where they are because they knew how to use that luck in their favor. Usually successful people are where they are because they work harder than everyone else they know.)

Like Elvis, the Beatles were small town boys thrust into an international limelight. Like Elvis, they had a rapid early success. Like Elvis, they had no idea how to handle the pressures, the money, or the fame. Both Elvis and the Beatles signed terrible contracts in their early years. Elvis hired Colonel Tom Parker as his manager. Parker managed to clean up Elvis’s contracts (while signing him to some other bad contracts that helped Parker), but no one could clean up the mess the Beatles had created. Even now, they’re paying for those early mistakes.

The Beatles signed away their musical copyrights in those years, and so now, they only get a percentage of the earnings of their music, instead of the full earnings. (You can see the difference in the income statements, mentioned in”How Rich Are the Beatles?” an Entertainment Weekly article published in the September 11^th issue: Ringo Starr, John Lennon’s estate, and George Harrison’s estate are worth between $155 million and $228 million, but Paul McCartney is worth about $716 million. The reason for the difference is simple: McCartney continued to play on a superstar level (Wings) and record his own songs for the intervening decades. I believe that had John Lennon lived, he would have had the same kind of career and a similar kind of wealth. George Harrison and Ringo Starr didn’t write as many songs and didn’t record very many solo albums, so their level of financial (and musical) success after the Beatles wasn’t as great as Lennon’s, and certainly not as impressive as McCartney’s.)

In other words, success has levels. All of us would be happy to earn $9 million per year like Lennon’s estate did in 2008, but how would we feel if we knew that had we negotiated a better contract forty years ago, we would be earning five to ten times as much? Someone else is earning the bulk of the money off the Beatles catalogue, a fact that still grates on Paul McCartney (and he says so).

Success is jolting and extremely unexpected, even if you’ve been preparing for it. What you have prepared for is never the same as what really hits you, which is what the Beatles were discussing in the quotes above.

Last week, I added definitions of success to the dictionary definition. Those additions are:

1. The world’s definition of success

2. Other people’s definition of success

3. Your definition of success

I discussed definitions one and two last week. This week, I’m going to focus on your definition of success.

Of course, I don’t know your real definition. I only know mine. So what I’m going to discuss is the personal definition of success that each freelancer has.

Our definitions of success are extremely personal. A benchmark for me would mean nothing to you. We discussed that from the outside last week, but let’s discuss it from the inside this week.

I have learned through teaching the Master Class over the past decade that most people can’t imagine success. Most people believe success will never happen. If it does happen, they think success will take care of itself. Or, if they do believe success will happen, their definition of that success is quite small.

For the Beatles in the early years, success was working continuously as musicians. They had become successful when they worked the clubs in Liverpool, even more successful when they went to Hamburg, and had achieved the pinnacle of success when their first record got played on the radio.

Had they imagined Beatlemania? Not in their wildest dreams. As a result, the Fab Four wasn’t prepared for the problems that came with that kind of success—some of which we can imagine (no privacy, getting mobbed in crowds, losing your anonymity) and some of which we can’t imagine (hence Harrison’s comment about Presley, from the point of view of someone who understands).

When success hits, you have no idea what your reaction to it will be. Many people actually get depressed because they have lost their goal or achieved their dream. They now have nothing to strive for. Or they feel like a fraud—especially if that success comes quickly. (You hear this a lot from people who became famous young. They have to prove themselves “worthy” of that success.)

But here’s my favorite reaction: often the successful person discounts the success.

There are reasons for that. Sometimes the success is overwhelming, so the way the person copes is to deny it’s happening (that’s in the 1963 Harrison quote; the person in the news articles is someone else). That’s an okay way to cope until it becomes impossible to deny. Then the successful person must in some way acknowledge the success.

But most often, the successful person discounts the success because to him, the achievement wasn’t a success at all.

Again, we get back to definitions.

I’ll use a personal one. In the early 1980s, I got three tentative job offers. They came from friends who had worked with me when I was in radio news. The first came from a colleague I respected greatly, a man who went on to behind-the-scenes success writing and researching for many broadcast news magazines. He told me that 60 Minutes was hiring, and he’d already put my name in. He said he would help me put my demo tape together, and get me an interview with the head producer there. My colleague said the interview was a formality. They’d already heard my work on his demo tape (I had engineered parts of it) and wanted me there.

The second job offer came from a friend who had become one of the documentary producers at WGBH in Boston. He wanted me to work for him. No interview, no demo tape. I didn’t have to do anything except get my butt to Boston to look for an apartment.

The third job offer came from a third friend. He had signed on with a start-up national television news channel called the Cable News Network, which was also called CNN. “They’re looking for great writers and engineers, Kris,” he said to me on the phone. “You have better credentials than I do and you’ll look better on camera. Get here now.”

I begged off the 60 Minutes interview. I said no to WGBH. I never went to CNN. Later, I met a news cameraman from CNN, a man who had worked at the station from the same time period that I got recruited.

“Hell,” he told me, “that’s how CNN offered jobs in those days. You would’ve been on-air talent. You’d be a household name by now.”

That’s when I realized that my work at the radio station in Madison, Wisconsin had been a success. I had—completely unsolicited—job offers or job solicitations from three of the best news organizations of the time. I had turned them all down—and I’m glad of it, even now.

Even back then, I knew that WGBH was a big deal. I figured being a researcher at 60 Minutes was a foot in the door on the national level, but nothing more. I had never heard of CNN, but I had figured out that if I moved away from Madison for any of those jobs, my career as a journalist would be underway.

I just hadn’t realized it was already underway, and that the offers themselves were a success.

Why hadn’t I realized that? I usually say because I was young and stupid, but the truth of it is that I hadn’t realized it because I didn’t define work in journalism—particularly broadcast journalism—as a way to achieve success.

I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be an on-air personality or a researcher for someone else. I didn’t want to produce documentaries (although I later did for both WHA in Madison and the Annenberg Foundation). I wanted to become an acclaimed writer, and I actually saw those job offers as roadblocks, not as stepping stones, to my success.

Honestly, for my goals then and now, those offers were roadblocks. Had I gone to New York or Boston or Atlanta, I would have become a different person. I never would have written fiction. I might be wealthier than I am now. I would certainly be more famous. I might even have a book or two under my belt—nonfiction, about some current event topic—and that book might have been a bestseller.

But it would have been a bestseller because of my on-air work, not because of my writing.

So, in reality, I wasn’t stupid at all. I knew what I wanted and how to go after it.

Even now, however, when I tell someone about those opportunities, that person often can’t understand why I turned down those chances. I could have become famous. I could have worked in TV. Why would I say no?

Over the years, I have watched a family member of mine do something similar. Since infancy, my relative was musical. He taught himself to play the piano quite young, learning to plink out songs by ear. He has an astonishingly beautiful singing voice. He composes stunning pieces of music. He’s also extremely charismatic and has excellent stage presence.

Dean used to think I said these things about my relative because he was someone I loved. Then, at a family event, Dean heard this young man sing for the very first time, and realized I hadn’t exaggerated. If anything, I had understated this young man’s abilities.

In my heart of hearts, I always wanted to be on Broadway in a role in musical theater. I am musical, love to sing, and love musicals. But I’m also an extreme introvert whose stage fright goes up when faced with a script. (I can ad lib and talk without a script just fine. Go figure.) I didn’t want to be a performer badly enough to find ways around my introversion and extreme stage fright.

But I dreamed…

Enter my young relative, whom I spent a lot of time with over the years. As he got older, he performed around the world with a international teen singing group. I went to New York to see him, and at the party afterwards, was there when he met some Broadway stars who had once been in the same international singing group. They offered to get him an audition.

He didn’t take it seriously.

Nor did he take a former girlfriend seriously when she went out to California and called with a job offer to play music for the movies. Or when another friend offered to help him launch a jazz career.

He never followed up.

Now, my thirty-something relative is a headhunter for a major corporation. He does not get paid for his music. He’s happily married with a baby on the way, which, he tells me achieves one of his biggest dreams.

I still want to see him on Broadway.

Note this: I want to see him on Broadway. He doesn’t go. There’s a small part of me that’s disappointed that he didn’t follow my dreams. Fortunately for him, I’m just a relative and not his mother or his wife. Imagine how that small sense of disappointment would gnaw at both of us—unfairly—for years.

I’ve known this young man his whole life. Never once did I hear him express a desire for a career in music or a life on the stage. If I had listened, I would have heard someone who wanted a happy family, a good job, and stability—things you will never ever have with an international musical career.

He’s achieving his dreams. He has success, the success he wants. It’s just not what I imagined for him. In other words, my disappointment in his choices has always been about me, not about him.

Over the years, I’m sure he had trouble talking to me about his goals and dreams because not only did I not see the same things for him, I also place no value on stability or a good day job. So his dreams were difficult for me to understand and value.

When you are in the position that I put my relative in—a position where you have to explain what success is to you to the people who love you—it’s an uncomfortable place to be. Most of us can’t articulate the importance of our dreams to people who understand them. It becomes doubly impossible when the people around us don’t understand them at all.

It’s not as fun celebrating a milestone with someone who doesn’t understand what that milestone means. It’s harder to live day to day with someone who misunderstands your success (or your lack of it—according to your perception). Sometimes you have to celebrate on your own. Sometimes you simply nod and continue, never correcting the people around you.

But occasionally, these warring definitions—from the dictionary definition to the world’s definition to other people’s definition to your definition—cause serious trouble.

And we’ll get to that next week.

Like all writers, I make my living by getting paid for each project I’m working on. The usual model is to pitch a book, get an advance payment, and then get to work. The publisher publishes the book and recoups that advance payment from the monies the readers spend when they buy the book. On the Freelancer’s Guide, I’ve cut out the publishing step. Which means I’m relying on you all to pay me the way that you would pay when you purchase the book in a bookstore. That’s why I’ve attached a donation button. Please feel free to e-mail me or comment below. And please forward the Freelancer’s Guide to other people. I appreciate the support.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Success Part Three” copyright 2009 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.