Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Risks

(Part One)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I know, I know.  I had a plan and I’m not sticking to it. This is why I have become more and more unemployable as the years go by.  I can’t even stick to my own plans, let alone plans someone else imposes on me.

Of course, I respect deadlines, which is why I’ve been able to meet this one for 51 weeks running. But last week, I told you I would write a few columns ahead—and I did—but I’m not posting them all yet.

Because a few things happened this week.  First, I read a couple of articles, one a couple of months old.  Then, I watched the Oscars, as I do every year.  And finally, I’ve been dealing with some major risk-takers in my business, negotiating with them, and finding my own footing.

As I took my run today, I realized that the time to write this opening section on risk—one of the topics I planned to cover—is now, while everything is fresh on my mind.  (And while I can find the links.)

Yes, I’m in the middle of the novel.  Yes, it’s going well.  And yes, I am interrupting my day to write this, precisely what I didn’t want to do. But I’ll get a few pages on the novel after this and maybe lose an hour of reading or an hour of sleep (or put off American Idol for another night).  (To see what business reason I have for watching American Idol, check out this post.)  Small price to pay to get this off my mind.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a list of posts I plan to write before I finish the Freelancer’s Guide.  The list keeps growing because of excellent suggestions I’m getting from you guys—I got two good ones just this week—and also because some of these topics are not one-post material.

Taking Risks is not a one-post topic either.  I’m going to write today’s as a kind of overview of the material out there, and then later, when I’m done with the networking posts, I’ll come back to taking risks.

So what happened this week?  A variety of things.  I decided to trust my own instincts in a rather brutal negotiation, something I would never have thought I’d have the courage to do twenty years ago.  Or ten years ago.

As I’ve said in the negotiation posts, I can negotiate quite well on paper and via e-mail, but I have trouble in person.  Or I should say, I had trouble in person.  I’d been avoiding in-person negotiation for so long that I hadn’t done it in nearly 15 years.  Not only did I realize this time that I wasn’t nervous, I was downright easy-going about the whole thing, quite willing to walk away where I wouldn’t have been years ago.  I did everything I said Dean does in the negotiation posts, and more.  And I did well.  I didn’t get everything I wanted, but neither did the other side.

How that fits into this whole topic is the in-person negotiation was quite a risk for me.  I could have passed this off to a third party—an agent, a lawyer, Dean himself—and I didn’t.  I decided that, in this particular instance, I knew better than anyone else what I wanted and didn’t want. Since the situation was extremely fluid, it was easier for me to handle it than to guide someone else through the ups and downs.

The risk paid off, and I learned something about myself in the bargain.  I learned that I am not the person I had been twenty years ago.  I have a lot more knowledge and self-confidence.  More than that, though, I have a longer view.  I know that if I screw up on this one thing, my life is not over.  I won’t die of embarrassment.  I won’t even die from the botched negotiation.  I’d simply not have everything I wanted.

As a character says in my current novel, “Whoop de ding dong do.”

The next thing that happened to me this past week was that I watched the Oscars.  I have watched the Oscars every year since I can remember—even scrounging around to find the telecast when I didn’t own a television set and the internet did not exist so that I could watch highlights on YouTube.  (Yes, I’m old.)  I love the Oscars for a variety of reasons, most of them personal, and some of them to do with my history.  (The Oscars [as well as television itself] was one of the few places where I saw artists talking about their art, even if it was in the artificial environment of an awards show.)

This year, as every year, award-winners talked inspiringly of being true to yourself, becoming an artist, and taking risks.  Three things caught my attention.  First, the mention by someone—Mo’Nique? Oprah? Geoffrey Fletcher (the screenwriter)—about the difficulties they had bringing a hard-hitting movie like Precious, Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire to the screen.  The movie is about a topic that most people prefer not to think about.  Yet several someones decided to make the movie, to finance it, to distribute it, and even more someones decided to see it, and slowly people realized just how special the film was.

Had the filmmakers listened to conventional wisdom, Precious would not have been made.  No one would have considered Push a novel that could become a major motion picture, and Gabourey Sidibe would be attending college somewhere in the Midwest instead of embarking on an already stellar acting career.

The second speech that caught my attention was Mo’Nique’s acceptance speech.  She took several risks, not just the risk of portraying a deeply unsympathetic character in a difficult movie.  She also decided not to play the political award-nominee game.  Nominees go from event to event, campaigning for votes without really ever mentioning their films.  The conventional wisdom is that if the nominee wants to win, the nominee must charm the establishment.  Mo’Nique refused, saying her performance was on the screen, and she should be judged by that.

Her refusal paid off.

The other interesting aspect to her speech was her phrase “doing what’s right.”  Her husband  supported her as she decided to portray this character, to go outside of the Mo’Nique brand—and she has quite a brand as a comedian, and as a talk show host on BET—and try something new.  She could have flopped.  Instead, she became known as a serious actress, one who can go places that more famous actresses refused to travel to.

The final speech that caught me was Sandra Bullock’s.  It wasn’t this speech so much as her Screen Actor’s Guild speech for the same role. But she reiterated part of it in her Oscar speech.

She said she wasn’t happy with her work.  So she took time away from it, to reassess, and decide what kinds of roles she wanted.  Then she took roles that challenged her.  Again, other actresses had turned down the role in The Blind Side that gave Sandra Bullock her Oscar. Would they have won for the same part? Hard to know.  Probably not: she owned it.

Again, she had support.  And while she credits the support with enabling her to make the changes, she might have made them anyway. She did so before, after the disastrous film Speed Two.  She took more control over her career—producing more films, and making sure she had a lot more creative input.  (For more on this, see her interview with Barbara Walters.)

Risk-taking.  Very important to those of us in the arts.  Important in other ways as well.

But risk-taking in the form of making a knowledgeable choice, one that assesses the pros and cons, not in the form of a flyer or a gamble.

I’ve been accused of being quite fiscally conservative—and I am when it comes to money I already have.  I used to think that the way I earned money was risky too, until this economy proved to me as well as to everyone else that my way—as a freelancer—might actually fiscally conservative as well.

Like Sandra Bullock, I prefer to control my career.  I can’t do that when I work for someone else.  I can work with someone else. But working for them is a greater risk for me than working with them.

I think freelancers must identify the one risk they want to take—starting a business, for example, or becoming an actress instead of a 9-5 worker at whatever job will take them, or stepping outside their comfort zone to attempt something that gives them the greater benefit.  Once the freelancers have identified the risk that they want to take, then they research that risk to death. They figure out how to take it in a manner that isn’t risky at all, or that minimizes risk, or that takes the risk into account and compensates for it in another area of the business.

An article that I read this week delves into this aspect of freelance risk-taking in great depth.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker’s January 18, 2010, issue called “The Sure Thing: How Entrepreneurs Really Succeed.”

The article discusses the high-level entrepreneur, the Ted Turners of the world, the guys who have tried something seemingly impossible and who have reaped big rewards.

But Gladwell uses his article, quoting many sources, to disprove the idea of entrepreneur as gambling risk-taker.  Instead, he discusses how the successful entrepreneur finds a way to make the risk into a sure thing—often at the expense of the entrepreneur’s reputation.  (He calls these men—and his examples here are all men—predators.  I’m not sure that’s accurate either, because the entrepreneurs aren’t out to kill their opponents.  They’re out to achieve some sort of success, often by taking advantage of something someone else missed.)

In the middle of this article, he paraphrases the economist Scott Shane, from Shane’s book The Illusions of Entrepreneurship (which, full disclosure, I have not read).

Gladwell writes, “[Shane] says many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.  The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formulation.”

He then goes on to list these things that the failed entrepreneurs did wrong.  Those things are:

•They undercapitalized the business.

•They didn’t form corporations (which, Shane says, gives a better chance of success).

•They didn’t have a business plan.

•They underemphasized marketing.

•They didn’t understand financial controls.

•They tried to compete on price.

Shane (and Gladwell) list several other factors, too complex to explain here—but some of which I deal with in other parts of the guide.  Then Gladwell writes this:

“Shane concedes that some of these risks are unavoidable: would-be entrepreneurs take them because they have no choice.  But a good many of these risks reflect a lack of preparation or foresight.” (Emphasis mine.)

I’ve been writing the freelancer’s guide for precisely this reason: I want you all to be prepared before you leap into the freelance lifestyle.  I want you to know—as best you can—what you’re getting into.

I’m not saying that you should become a freelancer, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t.  I’m simply saying that you should educate yourself before you make that choice.

I had planned to use this article in a post on risk, written much later in the Guide.  And then I came across this article in the Washington Post of March 10, 2010.  Written by Steve Pearlstein, the article, “News Flash for Wall St.: Money Isn’t Everything,” also cites Gladwell’s book, but focuses mostly on a book by Daniel Pink called Drive (again, I haven’t yet read this book either).

The Pink book uses decades of research from various sources to show the limits of money as a motivating tool for employees.  (Which is why you can find this article in the business section—and why it’s aimed at Wall Street, with its high bonuses and ridiculously overpriced compensation packages.)

“The conclusion Pink draws from all this research,” Pearlstein writes, “is that once people achieve a reasonable level of economic comfort and security, they are likely to be less easily motivated by monetary carrots and sticks than they are by more emotional factors.  And in modern workplaces, Pink argues that the most powerful emotional motivators are the desire for autonomy, the satisfaction that comes from mastering a skill or a task, and the need to serve some larger social purpose.”

In his New Yorker article, Gladwell also addresses the emotional side of work, only he discusses the emotional satisfaction the entrepreneur gets from his work.  (Substitute “successful freelancer” for “entrepreneur.”)

He writes, “…people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us.  Shane (the economist) says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.”

This all dovetails with my other experience this past week.  I turned down a high-paying writing gig that was mine if I but said I wanted it.  It would have paid all of my living expenses for six months, with more income off and on for years.

I didn’t even have to think about my choice. Once I heard what the project was, I said no. When the editor offering the project pushed, offering more incentives, I still said no.

Why? Because I knew that this project wasn’t worth the price.  Essentially, for that huge paycheck, I was going to have to be in someone else’s employ until the project ended, and I was unwilling to do that.

The no was so automatic, and cost me so little emotionally, that I didn’t even remember the conversation until Dean asked me later why the editor had called me.  When he heard the price tag, he asked why I hadn’t dropped his name into the mix. Then I told him the conditions of the project, and he recanted.  “Good thing you didn’t mention me,” he said.

This interaction fit into one more aspect mentioned in Gladwell’s article.  He writes, “People who like what they do are profoundly conservative.”

He then cites a study by sociologists Hongwei Xu and Martin Ruef.  They asked a large sample of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs which of these three scenarios they’d chose:

1. A business with a potential profit of five million dollars.

2. A business with a potential profit of two million dollars.

3. A business with a potential profit of 1.25 million dollars.

Business Number 1—with the possible profit of five million dollars—has a 20% chance of success.  Business Number 2 has a 50% chance of success.  Business Number 3 has an 80% chance of success.

The successful entrepreneurs generally went with Business Number Three, “the safe choice.”

He continues, “[The entrepreneurs] weren’t dazzled by the chance of making five million dollars.  They were drawn to the eighty-per-cent chance of getting to do what they love doing.  The [entrepreneur] is a supremely rational actor.  But, deep down, he is also a romantic, motivated by the simple joy he finds in his work.”

What Gladwell misses—or perhaps ignores—is that there is still a 20% chance of failure in that third scenario.  A 20% chance that the entrepreneur—the freelancer—will not make that $1.25 million dollars, no matter what he does.

That 20% chance is too much of a risk for most people.  Most people want the completely sure thing—the paycheck at the end of the week, the schedule imposed by someone else, the benefits paid for by the company.  Most people don’t like to be on a 5% ledge, let alone a 20% ledge.  These are the people who got caught flat-footed by the Great Recession.  People who thought they had a guaranteed income for the rest of their life, people believed their job was secure because they were good employees who worked for stable companies.

As I mentioned in the Day Job posts, no job is secure.  But the illusion of security is often more important to people than the reality of risk.

It’s because of this 20% risk that more people don’t become freelancers.  And it’s because of the lure of big money (that $5 million Number One Choice) that too many people give up their day jobs—and then fail big time.

Those of us who have worked for ourselves for a long time have figured out what makes us happy.  We balance our income with our taste for risk.  We know what we need to survive, and we do that.  Then we figure out how much risk we can tolerate—and what we’re putting at risk.

Are we risking our homes? Our families? Then, in my opinion, we’re taking too much risk.  Are we risking a $750,000 profit instead of a $1.25 million dollar profit?  Is that part of the 20% failure rate?  And in what world does a $750,000 purely profit paycheck constitute a failure?

Assessing risk is one of the most important part of a freelancer’s business.  If you’ve read through the entire guide, you know that risk-assessment is a constant undercurrent to everything.  I’ll get more specific in a few weeks.

Until then, look at these two articles, and maybe do some risk assessment of your own.  Figure out what you need as a freelancer and what you want for yourself and your career.  What are you risking when you step out of your comfort zone, like Mo’Nique did?  A few days of work? An emotional upset?  A flop?  And if you are risking a giant flop, will it have an impact on your everyday work?  In Mo’Nique’s case, I doubt that it would have.  She would have continued her careers as a comedian and as a talk show host.

If The Blind Side had flopped, would it have damaged Sandra Bullock’s career?  All About Steve flopped so badly earlier this year that Bullock earned a Razzie for the Worst Actress of the Year on the same weekend that she won her Oscar.  Not all of her risks have paid off.  And yet, she is taking them.

I don’t know the calculations she made in accepting the roles in these two films.  Since Bullock has proven herself to be a smart businesswoman over and over again, I’m sure she went into both projects with a lot of analysis, looking at the potential upside versus the potential downside.

As freelancers, that’s our job.  We might not earn six months living expenses with one project, but we also don’t have to work for anyone else.  I wasn’t willing to trade three months of misery for six months of money.  Other people make different choices.

But I might miss the brass ring on occasion as well because I wouldn’t have gone for that $5 million/80% chance of failure choice.  I have never taken a flyer like that, although I have failed at businesses for precisely the reasons listed in the Gladwell article.  I’ve learned my lesson in that beloved school of hard knocks.

I’ve designed the freelancer’s guide so that you don’t have to go to that horrible school.  If you think about your choices, do a risk-analysis, and find the conservative route to the best choice for you.

These two articles, and the various studies they quote, show (yet again) that money does not buy happiness.  True happiness comes from doing what you love.

And that, my friends, is worth the risk.

The Freelancers Guide has been a risk for me from the beginning.  As I mentioned in the early posts, I decided to write something on spec—without an upfront advance—something I rarely do with book-length work.  I trusted my readers to fund the project, which is why I have a donation button.  I also decided to risk putting this up for free on the web, and to give people permission to forward the posts, so long as I get credit.  Finally—and more recently—I have decided to organize the entire Guide into an e-book that I will give to anyone who has donated, just as soon as I write the final section of the Guide.

I didn’t expect to enjoy the Guide, nor did I expect the interactivity.  This entire experience has paid off in more ways than one.  In my risk assessment of this project, I figured I’d give it a month.  If I got no feedback and no compensation, I would at least have three chapters so that I could send out a proposal to nonfiction houses, hoping that one of them would give me an advance to finish the book.  The risk, for me, was a loss of several day productive work with no promise of return.  That was on the outside edge of my risk tolerance.

While I haven’t earned a standard advance yet, I’ve gained a lot in intangibles. The risk has paid off in more ways than I could count.  I couldn’t do this project without you readers.  Thank you, each and every one.

“Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Risks (Part One)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Continuing Education (Networking Part Two)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

It’s interesting for me to write the Guide as I have.  In two more posts, I will have been writing this for a year.  However, I haven’t spent the entire year on it.  I’ve written two novels while doing the Guide and a number of short stories, as well as other pieces of nonfiction.

As I mentioned last week, I’m writing these networking posts while Dean and I are conducting a writing workshop.  Technically, I’m not conducting much.  I spoke on the first night, and I’ve been there for several meals.  Dean’s done 99% of the work, as he does on a number of these workshops.

But I do a lot of networking while they’re going on.  The writers who come to our workshops are mostly professionals, so they have contacts and ties and various things happening in their careers.  For this workshop, Denise Little of Tekno Books kindly joins us, and she brings her unique perspective, not just to the workshops, but also to the casual discussions.

Dean will tell you, with disgust, that most of my conversations at these things revolve around books, television, movies, and cats.  Not books that people are working on—books we’ve read.  (I’d talk politics, but we learned long ago to ban that topic from our workshops, along with religion.)  He’s right: my tables at the dinners usually focus on peripheral things. But mixed with those important discussions of cat health and the latest hot TV show are tidbits about writing, writers, business, and professionalism.

If we only discussed writing and writing-related business, we’d get bored with each other pretty quickly.  The fact that we do talk about other things slowly builds friendships and friendships are an important part of networking.

I know some of you are wondering how long this workshop is going on. After all, I mentioned it in last week’s post. By the time you read this, the workshop will have ended days before.  But I’ll be referring to it this week and next as if it were still on-going, because, from my perspective it is.

I’m writing the next two posts during the workshop because I’m about to dive into another novel.  Unlike the previous two, this one has already informed me (yes, novels talk to their creators—or at least, my novels talk to me) that it wants to be the only thing I write.  Apparently, my subconscious knows I need to focus—and focus hard—on this book to do it right.

I’ve learned, over the years, to listen to that. Rather than get annoyed at the Guide, I’m going to write ahead.  I’m teaching another workshop in March, and won’t have time to write fiction then.  So I’ll write another batch of posts during that full week.

I’m telling you this partly to show process (because some of you have said you were interested) and partly so that you’ll know why my references seem so screwy in the next few weeks.   Or perhaps I should say, screwier than usual…

Rather than title these posts “Part One,” “Part Two,” and “Part Three,” as I have in the past, I’m going to give them actual titles, and then include the part number in parenthesis, as I did above. The reason for this is that the various forms of networking are vastly different, and I can see that some sections will have subheadings of subheadings.

(Can I get more baroque?  Um, well, yes….)

Anyway, I’m starting with continuing education because that’s what’s happening around here this week.  We’re teaching continuing education classes for professional writers.  We’re doing one as I write this (or rather, Dean and Denise are) and we’ll do another in March. (On marketing.  Here’s the link.)

Dean and I often say to writers that money should flow to the writer, except for continuing education.  In that area, the writer needs to spend money to expand her horizons.  I think that’s true of most professions, although I’m not entirely certain.  I know that some professions require an annual fee to remain current—dues of some kind—and others require an annual fee plus proof of continuing education (certain medical professions, for example [and thank heavens for that!]).

The reason we have to tell writers that money should flow to them and not away from them is that in writing (and I suspect many of the arts professions), scam artists have learned that the practitioners know little about business.  It’s easy to convince a young professional writer or a wannabe to spend money on something that the writer should either get for free or should be paid for.

For more on that subject, see Dean’s Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing posts and the other writing posts on his website.

Suffice to say, though, that the professional should continually update her knowledge in one way or another—whether it’s at formal classes provided through the bar association or through a continuing education track at a university, or whether it’s in the form of workshops or seminars, or whether it’s just through trade magazine subscriptions and related books on the subject.  The professional who does not continually educate herself in the changes in her profession gets left behind.

There is no set rule of thumb on continuing education.  Some states mandate the amount of continuing education some professionals receive to maintain their license.  (For example, the forensic psychologist I worked for had to have [I believe] fifteen hours of continuing education over two years to maintain his license.  Minor, in the scheme of things.)  Most professions have no such requirement—and freelancers often don’t.

As I mentioned above, some continuing education comes in the form of books, trade journals, websites—all things you can consume at home or during off hours at work.

The main topic here, however, is networking.  Continuing education provides countless opportunities for networking.  Sometimes the networking comes through the instructor himself—his resume, and his track record for success through his programs.  Sometimes (often) the networking comes through the other professionals at the seminar.  People trade business cards, make contacts, and discuss business in the line for coffee during the break, over lunch, and in the elevator on the way to meetings.  I’ve made a lot of contacts that way, some of whom I’d forgotten by the time I get home, and some who have become lifelong friends.

(A tip: when you receive a business card from someone at a conference or seminar, write a note about your conversation on the back of the card.  You’ll be glad you did. By the time you get home, you will have 10-20 business cards, and no real way to remember who is who if you don’t make notes.  I learned that one through hard experience.)

First, let’s talk about how you evaluate a continuing education program outside the home.

1. Figure out where the holes are in your knowledge base and find a way to fill them.  What don’t you know or what don’t you know well?  That part’s pretty self-explanatory.  Let’s assume you need a better way to do bookkeeping in your business, but you don’t want to hire a bookkeeper. (Or you have hired a bookkeeper, and then you read the section on employees here in the Guide, and realize you really should supervise that person. Which means you should understand what he’s doing.)

You’ve never kept books for any business, and the computer programs you can download seem unbelievably complex.  You have no idea whether you need double-entry bookkeeping or what even the “accrual” bookkeeping method is.

You need to ask yourself: Can you learn this on your own or do you need guidance?

Some things are relatively easy to learn on your own. But some things require assistance.  What those “things” are vary from person to person.  Only you can answer the above questions.  You also are the only one who knows if you can go to the weekend seminar on bookkeeping sponsored by the local chamber of commerce (we had one such seminar in our tiny resort town just last week) or if you need a full-on course at the local community college.

If you need the course, take it.  You’ll probably find yourself with other professionals—or maybe budding accountants who might become good bookkeepers when you’re ready to hire a few years from now.

The seminar at the local chamber might serve you better, however, and you’ll get to know the other business people in your area.  You’ll gain contacts as well as knowledge.

2. Do a cost-benefit analysis.  Two factors should go into your analysis of cost: time and money.  Let’s take money first, because that’s the most obvious part of a cost-benefit analysis.  First, what will it cost you not to learn the information?  Will it harm your business financially?

Obviously, not knowing how to keep the books for your business will hurt you in the long run.  So you need to learn how to do it.  Let’s assume that a weekend seminar in your hometown costs $50 (including lunch), a bookkeeping course at the community college costs $250, and the best bookkeeping software with tutorial costs $100.  (I’m making these numbers up.)

Clearly, the seminar is the cheapest.  But will it give you the most bang for the buck? Will you have to buy software anyway? If so, your cost just went up at least another $50.  (The recommended software without the tutorial.)  What will you gain from the seminar that you won’t gain from the software itself?

The answer used to be pretty simple: You used to be on your own with software, and a seminar would give you people to consult. But now, with websites and FAQs and help lines, you might get the information help you need to understand the software—or not.

If you’re mathematically challenged, you might be better off in the class.  (I’m not suggesting the class because you’re mathematically challenged and don’t understand that $250 is more than $50—if that’s your issue, you shouldn’t be in business at all.)  But if you didn’t do well in math at school or you left before you had second-year Algebra or you cribbed your homework off the kid next to you and never really learned anything past basic arithmetic, then a class might be the best thing for you.  The teacher will help you, step-by-step, because that’s what she gets paid for, and you’ll have months to learn something that has given you fits in the past.

The toughest part of the cost-benefit analysis is the time factor.  Some of us—particularly those of us who run our own businesses—simply don’t have the four hours per week for sixteen weeks that a course at a community college would require.  Some of us will have trouble carving a weekend out of our schedule for the seminar.  For some businesses, like that retail store I discussed last week, weekends are the busiest time of the week.  If you don’t have an employee to cover for you, you can’t go.

But will you spend more time struggling to learn the computer software in an unfamiliar discipline?  Are you willing to take that risk?  You have to answer that as you make these choices.

Fortunately, none of these choices are life or death.  If you try the software first and it doesn’t work, you can go to the weekend seminar.  If you’re more confused after the seminar than you were with the software, then you might have to take a class.  Of course, all of this will lose you time and money—you’re now at $400 plus the weekend plus the sixteen weeks of class plus the time you lost trying to figure out the damn software.

Sometimes the cheapest route turns out to be the most expensive.  Sometimes the shortcut you take to save time doesn’t save any time at all—and may even cost you more time than you ever bargained for.

3. Evaluate the seminar/class/workshop/conference.  Who are the instructors?  Are they well respected in their fields? Are they people you can learn from?

And here’s the biggie: Are they people you want to learn from?

I learned about the differences between instructors in my twenties.  I have said, ever since I can remember, that my goal in life was to be a professional writer.  I defined professional—even as a kid—as someone who made her living from writing.

Early on, I believed that you could not make a living as a fiction writer, so I went into journalism. That belief was a faulty one—fiction writers can and do make a living, and can, in fact, make a much better living than journalists (particularly nowadays).

Even though I was a history major in college, I took creative writing courses, and felt vaguely dissatisfied throughout without knowing why.  I graduated, mailed out my fiction, and developed a relationship with Ellen Datlow at Omni Magazine.  She apparently felt as frustrated as I did at my inability to break into her magazine, so she sent me the information on Clarion Writers Workshop, which was then held at Michigan State University for six weeks over the summer.

I applied; I got in; I attended.  I learned more in six weeks than I ever learned in my college creative writing courses.  Of course, I was learning from published professionals (not all of whom were earning a living, but I didn’t know that at the time).  I grew and developed as a writer, and within six months of my return had sold my first professional short story.

But I was still a journalist, and one nice thing about being a reporter is that you can ask a question, and then get paid to seek the answers.  So I asked why did I learn more at Clarion than I did in my prestigious university’s writing courses.  I interviewed the director of Clarion, and I interviewed the director of creative writing at the university—and learned something startling, something that made me, young firebrand that I was, furious.

I asked both directors the same set of questions.  What I remember asking was a do-you-beat-your-wife question of the university creative writing director—why isn’t your program turning out professional writers?  What I really asked him—I was a diplomatic little thing—was for a list of the writers who had gone through his program who made a living at writing.

He said they didn’t keep those records.

I asked why.

He said because that’s not the point of the program.

Feeling a bit stunned, I asked, if you’re not trying to create professional writers, what are you trying to do?

He said that they were trying to get as many of their students into qualified MFA programs in creative writing.

Okay, I said, but then what? Don’t you know who graduated and became a professional writer?

He explained to me, as if I was stupid which I guess I was, that the point of an MFA in creative writing was not to become a professional writer, but to go on to get a doctorate in writing, so that the student could then become a professor of creative writing at a prestigious university.  He had the figures on that success rate, if I wanted to see it.

I don’t remember if I did or did not.  I did want to fall off my chair.  I was furious—at him, and at myself.  No one had told me the goal of the university’s creative writing program before.  Of course, I hadn’t asked either.  I had wasted years—literally years—of my education, being taught by instructors whose goal for me was different than my own.

Of course I learned more at Clarion, which was designed to help young writers become professional.  I had finally found the right classes and the right instructors.

Not that there is anything wrong with becoming a professor.  I come from a family filled with them.  I’m one of the few people in my family who does not have an advanced degree in something or other.

But I never wanted to be a professor.  I wanted to be a professional writer.  And I had gone to the wrong instructors at the wrong school who proceeded—innocently enough—to teach me the wrong trade.

It took me years to realize that the mistake had not been theirs.  It had been mine.  (Even though I was raised by a professor who repeatedly said as I was growing up that no one should go to college to learn a trade.  I guess that cluestick continually missed me.)

Now when I want to learn something from someone else, I research their credentials first and foremost.  I would have told the young me to skip the MFAs and the PhDs even if those professors had earned those degrees at top-ranking universities (which many of my instructors had).  I would have told the young me to go to science fiction conventions and writers conferences and attend panels/workshops run by writers who were making a documented living at their profession.  By documented, I mean that they had a bibliography—works in print, that I could find and read and evaluate.

I still attend seminars.  I often go to writers conferences as an instructor so that I can sit in on panels by other professional writers and learn from them.  Dean and I spoke at the Space Coast Writers Conference a few years ago because of the roster of guests and because we wanted to visit Cape Canaveral, which we did.  The added bonus of that writer’s conference? The attendees, many of whom worked at NASA during the glory years of the moon landings.  Boy, did I learn a lot. Boy, did I enjoy myself. Boy, did I make connections.

Other things to evaluate:  Will you get time with the instructors? Will you learn from the other attendees? Will you have incidental costs—hotel rooms, plane fare, meals—or will a seminar/class in your hometown do just as well for you?

4. List your reasons for attending.  Some freelancers become conference/workshop junkies.  I’ll discuss this phenomenon in full in a later post, but make sure you’re not going “because everyone else is” or “because you don’t want to miss anything.”

It’s perfectly fine to go to a conference because you need to get out of your routine—all of us, particularly those of us who work at home, do that on occasion—but make sure you’re not doing that too much.  (And realize there might be cheaper ways to break your routine than flying across country for a conference.)

5. Plan your continuing education year.  Use your calendar and figure out how many hours you can devote to outside learning—conferences, classes, seminars.  Do this before looking at the conference listings for your profession.  Then stick to that timeline.  One year Dean and I made the mistake of traveling 26 weekends (out of 52).  That hurt our business and it hurt us.  We had reasons for each conference we attended (and no, friends and former students, the reasons weren’t just “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”), but those reasons were not enough to justify that much time away from our businesses.

There’s a reason that the professions which require a certain number of hours of continuing education require those hours over a two or three year period.  To require the hours in one year makes it hard for the working professional to meet the requirements and make a living.  Remember that as you set up your timeline.

6. Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone.  If you do attend a conference/workshop/seminar, make sure you do more than go to panels and sit quietly in the back.  Meet the other attendees.  Go to meals.  Go to the pre-banquet happy hour.  Talk to people.  Exchange contact information.   You can and will learn from the attendees.

It always stuns me that a small handful of writers attend our classes and never come out of their rooms.  They do the homework, do the writing, and do the reading, but they don’t meet their fellow attendees. Those fellow attendees may go on to be bestselling or award-winning writers, well-known editors or influential publishers.  All of those things have happened to our past students.  You never know which contact will prove valuable in the future.

Dean and I use the workshops as well.  The reason I’m writing the Freelancer’s Guide on my blog is because of contacts I made at a workshop nearly twenty years ago.  Michael Totten and Scott William Carter came to a workshop Dean and I were running every week in Eugene, Oregon.  Michael and Scott were college students then.  They’ve gone on to become professional writers who know a lot about computers.

When Dean and I decided we needed to know more about websites, blogs, and internet business, we asked to meet Scott and Michael in a nearby city. We bought them dinner, and for four hours, they told us what we needed to know to start.  We have been talking to them off and on for an entire year, sharing information and learning.

Learning we would never have made if we had dismissed them as just college students and wannabe writers all those years ago.

When you go to a seminar, be professional. Dress well. Be polite. But talk to people.  And more importantly, listen to them.  You’ll be surprised what you learn.

Continuing education is a very important part of your business.  Without it, you will stagnate and your business will stop growing. But don’t let education overwhelm your business.  Remember why you’re doing this and make each educational project work for you.

Next week, I’ll deal with groups—from support groups to professional organizations, the original point of the query from Carolyn Nicita that started this thread.

In the future, I’ll deal with social media.  Please let me know how you’re networking effectively online. The more information I get from the readers, the more I can share.  You can reach me here.

One thing Michael Totten told me when I started this project was that people would donate if they felt they got value from something they read online.  Many of you have helped him prove his point to me over and over again.  I appreciate that.  I’ve added the donate button below.  If you can’t donate, please forward news of the Freelancer’s Guide to freelancers you know—and to listserves with freelancers on them.  Networking, you know.  Thanks, y’all.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Continuing Education (Networking Part Two)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

January, 2010

Bruen, Ken, The Guards, St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2001.  Let me just say, “Oh, my.”  I had no idea you could write like this and get published.  The Guards is a prose poem of darkness, with a character that I—the daughter of two alcoholics—should hate, and I don’t hate him even though he drinks his way through the entire novel, and makes all the mistakes that an alcoholic makes.  Set in Ireland and very very dark, very well written, unforgettable.  One of the best novels I’ve read in years.  Seriously.  Buy it, read it, but not before bed.

Cantrell, Rebecca, A Trace of Smoke, Forge, 2009.  One of the best first novels I’ve read in years.  One of the best novels I’ve read in years, quite honestly. Set in 1931 Berlin, A Trace of Smoke follows Hannah Vogel as she tries to find out why her brother was murdered. That her brother was gay and part of Berlin’s night club scene makes her work all the more difficult.  She manages to show the bone-shaking poverty of the time, along with the menace of the political situation.  The rise of the Nazis, and the involvement of some famous Nazis makes this story all the more hair-raising.

But the book is unputdownable because of one character, Anton, about whom I’m going to say little without spoiling the read.  From his first line of dialogue to the very end of the novel, Anton kept me reading.  Wonderful job. Evocative novel.  Set aside several hours because you’ll read it in one sitting.

Carlin, Peter Ames, Paul McCartney: A Life, Touchstone, 2009.  Paul McCartney was my first crush, back before my age had two digits in it.  I must’ve been four when I first became aware of the man.  I thought him marvelous then, and I still like him even now, which is more than I can say for any other childhood or teenage crush.  I don’t think I find him sexy so much as intriguingly creative.  Talk about surviving a long-time career, and still going strong.

Carlin’s book is very, very well written, and very thin.  He did do his interviews with the side players and did all of his research, but obviously didn’t interview McCartney.  The book skips over things in an odd fashion—like John Lennon’s murder. Carlin assumes we all know how Lennon died.  I’m not sure a 20-something who ended up liking Beatles: Rock Band will know.  Still, I couldn’t put this down—and much of that was the sentence-by-sentence writing (and the subject matter, of course).

Gates, David Edgerly, “Skin and Bones,” Between The Dark And The Daylight And 27 More Of The Best Crime & Mystery Stories of The Year, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Tyrus, 2009.  I have no idea how I missed this excellent story when it first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.  It’s a marvelous hardboiled novella that got nominated for the Edgar award (deservedly so), set in 1949 New York. The language is right, the feel is right, the town is right—and it reads like a novel.  It’s as deep and rich as anything else you’ll read this year.  Highly Recommended.

Gorman, Ed and Greenberg, Martin H., editors, Between The Dark And The Daylight And 27 More Of The Best Crime & Mystery Stories of The Year, Tyrus, 2009.  I love this volume every year, and every year, I only recommend a few stories from it.  Partly that’s because I’ve already recommended some of the stories (like Doug Allyn’s “Pig Party”) and partly it’s because the quality of this volume is so consistently good that stories which would normally stand out are part of a piece here.  This best of the year volume always has more of the award-winning and nominated stories than its competitor, and is probably more representative of the short mystery field.  The only thing I really would like to improve the volume is the kind of analysis that Gardner Dozois and Ellen Datlow do in their best of the year volume.  (The Jon L. Breen overview is nice, but not enough.) Pick this up.  It’s good.

James, P.D., Talking About Detective Fiction, Knopf, 2009.  This little book was a joy to read.  From the dust jacket to the paperstock to the inky smell of the pages, the actual book itself was a pleasure to hold.  The subject matter is one I love, and the writer herself is one of my very favorites.

She doesn’t disappoint.  This little book on detective fiction focuses mostly on the British tradition (which makes sense, since P.D. James is a British writer), but the analysis is cogent and thought-provoking. She takes aim at a few other critics of mystery fiction, always remembering that the important thing about fiction is its ability to tell a story.  Her insights into her own work are great, but my favorite part of the book is her discussion of the American hardboiled tradition versus the British drawing room mystery, both of which were being developed at the same time.

I’ve never seen the two traditions analyzed as a product of their time before (the late 1920s and early 1930s).  I learned a lot reading this little book and I enjoyed the experience of holding it.  What more can you want?

Kinsale, Laura, Lessons in French, Sourcebooks, January, 2010.  Ah, Laura Kinsale is back and all is right with the world. Seriously, does anyone else get depressed when one of their favorite writers doesn’t put out a book for a few years?   Kinsale hit some personal setbacks in her writing (she alludes to them in her Author’s Note), and they made her stop publishing books for a while.  I, for one, missed her tremendously.

Kinsale wrote one of my favorite novels ever, Flowers from the Storm, which is not your classic romance novel.  It’s better. It’s better than most novels in any genre.  Is Lessons in French that good? No, of course not, but Kinsale hit it out of the park with Flowers.  I don’t ask my favorite writers to hit a homerun each time at bat, but I do want them to hit the ball.  And to extend the already overwrought metaphor, Lessons in French is at least a double, maybe a triple.

Wonderful characters, great situations, lots of humor without being a funny book, lots of tension—and a bull named Hubert who becomes very important to the plot.  This book lives and breathes adventure and fun and warmth and…oh, I read it too fast.  Please, is there another Kinsale novel on the horizon? Please?

And, last week, I got interviewed for the nifty podcast site, StarShipSofa. Check out the excerpt here. The entire interview will be posted soon.  Check out the entire website here.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Networking Part One

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sometimes the topics that I’ve overlooked in my single-minded attempt at finishing this Guide astound me.  If I had written a proposal for the Guide before I actually completed the manuscript, I would have estimated the Guide’s length at 70,000 words, and I would have covered a few of the topics herein.  At the moment I’m at 130,000 words and counting, with six more topics of my own to cover.

As you can tell from that opening paragraph, this week’s topic is one I hadn’t thought of.  I should have thought of it; I discuss networking with my writing students all the time.  In fact, I network each and every day.  But I hadn’t considered it a stand-alone topic for the Guide, even though I mention networking in many of the posts.

Writer Carolyn Nicita e-mailed me with the idea, only she labeled the topic “Support Groups and Professional Organizations.”  She also gave me a list of such organizations and groups, as well as subjects to discuss—which I greatly appreciate.  Her list is comprehensive and helpful, and made it clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to cover this in one single Guide post.

Why did I chose “Networking” as my topic instead of “Support Groups”?  Because networking has become extremely important to modern business in a variety of ways, from the support groups and professional organizations that Carolyn mentioned to seminars and continuing education to becoming active on social media and the web.

If you’ve found a particular type of networking to be helpful or harmful to your freelance business, please e-mail me this week.  I’ll work your comments into the next few installments of the Guide.  (And if it’s okay to quote you, please tell me, along with any website address that I can link to.)

“Networking,” by the way, is a very modern term.  As I started this post, I grabbed the dictionaries around my desk and looked through them for the word “networking.”  I didn’t expect to find that word in the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Fifth Edition) that my grandparents bought my father the year he entered college (1936)—and of course, I didn’t find it in there.  I did find “network,” however, which had three definitions: a fabric or structure of cords or threads that cross each other at certain intervals and are secured in their crossing with knots, etc; Any system of lines that interlace like a net; and—the dictionary is very specific here—in radio terminology, a chain of stations.

Meaning that network used to define broadcast media was very new in 1936.  Of course it would be.  I hadn’t thought about that much.  Then I picked up my college dictionary, the Macmillan Contemporary Dictionary from 1979.  I expected to find “networking” in there, but it wasn’t there at all.  Instead, I found the first reference to people:  “interconnected organization or system—‘a network of spies.’”  I also found that they’d added to the radio definition (of course), by including television and by defining how those networks interlinked—through coaxial cables.

By the mid-1980s—Webster’s New World Dictionary, for those of you keeping track—nothing had changed.  I expected networking by then as well, but I was early.  After all, the desktop computer had just arrived into American homes.  I got my first in those years.

If I hefted my butt out of my chair and high-tailed it upstairs to the computer with my internet connection—on a DSL line, thank you, which these old dictionaries had never heard of—I could tell you to the year when “networking” became a noun.  Probably in the mid-1990s.  It appears in the dictionary built into the rather ancient computer that I write on—a 2005 iMac.  The Encarta World English Dictionary has six definitions of network—and the second is all about people.  (“A large and widely distributed group of people or things such as shops, colleges, or churches, that communicate with one another and work together as a unit or system.”)  The 2005 definition also includes computers—of course—and “telecommunications” systems designed to exchange information.

So the definition of network has grown in the past 75 years.  As that definition grew, we added the new term “networking.”  Encarta’s definitions clearly show that the word came from computing.  The first definition—“the linking of computers so that uses can exchange information…”—shows the word’s history and most important usage (at least to the people who wrote the dictionary).

The second definition is the one that applies to us:  “The building up or maintaining of informal relationships, especially with people whose friendship could bring advantages such as job or business opportunities.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Why do I always start these long, interconnected (networked?) posts with dictionary definitions? Because words tell us a great deal about ourselves.  Words that exist in English but don’t exist in, say, Russian show us the difference between the cultures.

And words that have come into use or whose usage has changed within a single generation tell us about our culture.

I’m sure people networked in 1936.  I’m sure they called it something else.  (And, by the way, none of my dictionaries use “network” as a verb.  When did that happen?  Since 2005?)  I’m equally sure that the networking that occurred in 1936 was not on the same scale that people network on today.    The opportunities simply weren’t there.  People had relationships within their communities, but the chance to network with people from all over the country, let alone all over the world, belonged only to a few.

If you read about the early history of broadcasting—one of my favorite topics, actually—you learn that the live radio broadcasts that our grandparents remember from World War II came about because of a change in technology, and a small group of reporters who all knew each other.  They got thrown onto the air because there was no one else, not because they were particularly good at it.

Early networks often work that way.  Only a handful of people might have the skills to do a particular job, but those people might not be known to each other.  So friends hire friends and then offer on-the-job training.  It’s human nature.

Last night, on The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson, Ferguson held a fascinating hour-long Tom Snyderish interview with British actor Stephen Fry.  In the middle of that wide-ranging discussion, they talked about Twitter.  Ferguson just joined Twitter; Fry was an early adopter who talked about the early days of Twitter.

In the beginning, Twitter grew by word of mouth—friends verbally told friends about it.  Broadcasters started discussing it when celebrities started having “races” to increase the number of people following them, but the culture didn’t take Twitter seriously until the Iranian elections last summer.  Iran closed its borders to outside journalists and censored broadcasts that left the country, but didn’t shut down its cell phone networks—at least not right away.  Real live news, from regular people, filtered through Twitter onto the net, and then out into the world.

A network that most people had initially seen as frivolous and a joke had suddenly gained international importance—and for many people, particularly those in Iran, life-or-death importance.

The world has become very small and the networks very large.  My Facebook friends include people from Russia, Germany, France, Spain, South Korea, and Colombia, as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.  Have I met all of these people face-to-face? No.  But I have met most of them either through my website or their website or Twitter.  I’ve done business with quite a few of them, even though we’ve never spoken on the telephone and we’re on different parts of the globe.  I’ve read their work; they’ve read mine.  We actually communicate in ways unthinkable as recently as fifteen years ago.

And I’m benefiting a great deal from the networks that have come about via the internet.  I’ve sold short stories because of Twitter, novels because of Facebook.  I’ve worked with movie production companies through e-mail and done broadcast interviews via Skype.  I’ve been in touch with bookstores in Australia that carry my work and done online interviews for their websites.  I’ve gone to conventions overseas because the organizers can reach me via my website, and I’ve been paid for overseas publications through PayPal, so I don’t have to go through the rigmarole that banks require on any check received in another currency.

Networks are important, not just in established businesses like mine, but also in growing businesses.  The woman we sold our collectibles store to in 2008 had a bumpy first winter, not just because it was the middle of the Great Recession, but also because she relied on the old-fashioned way to do business—word-of-mouth in our small tourist town.

She had repeat business from tourists who had come through the year before, and she had business from some local ads, but not enough to sustain her through our slow times.  She was good at money management, and she had low expenses, so she made it through, but she learned quickly that she needed to do more.

Dean had taught her how to put collectibles on eBay, but she hadn’t wanted to do the work.  Not because she was work-averse—she isn’t; she’s a very hard worker—but because she wasn’t that comfortable with computers.

Still, a hard winter will convince anyone to make a few changes.  So she put a few items on eBay, and then a few more, and then even more.  Slowly, she has formed an online network of people all over the world who are interested in the items she puts up for sale, from toy trains to cookie jars.  She’s known for quick service and quality products, and she’s making it through this winter just fine.

The network of local shop owners helped her as well, answering her online questions, and forming a group that shared the cost of local advertising.  She has a network of suppliers that she’s established, people who comb junk shops and garage sales for that one special item.  Her networks are helping her grow her business.

But there’s a downside to networks as well. They can be time-consuming, and they can be destructive.  Carolyn’s points, from her e-mail, concern support groups and professional organizations, but they can apply to all networks in one way or another.

She mentions these:

•How to know when you need a group

•How to know when you need to get out of a group you’re already in

•How to cope with infighting and sabotage in your group

•Legal and financial ramifications

•Opportunities

•Resource-sharing

•How to know if you’re a groupaholic

•Goal and dream sharing

I’m also going to deal with two personality types:

•The master networker who has no work to stand on

•The excellent craftsperson who can’t network to save her life

There are a lot of other topics as well, which I know I will touch on as I get deeper into this subject.

I’m going to structure networking into a variety of components.

First, I’ll deal with in-person networks:  support groups, professional organizations, seminars, conferences, and continuing education.  I’ll deal with the upsides—the interaction, the contacts—and the downsides.

Then, I’ll deal with social media networks.  I’d like help with this one from readers if I can get it.  I’m active on Facebook and Twitter, as well as here on my own blog.  I also belong to some listserves, many of which have existed for a decade or more.  I have a Linked-In account, but I don’t make the best use of it. And as someone reminded me on my Facebook page just the other day, I need to tend to my page on Goodreads.com (a page I didn’t start; someone else did).  I’m sure that there are other social media networks I know nothing about and which might be helpful to freelancers reading the Guide. So use the contact button here on the site and send me an e-mail.

(She writes, hoping that her network of readers will come through.)

Finally, I’ll deal with peripheral networks—networks that get built without you even realizing you’re doing so.  The store owner above had no idea she was building a network of train collectors when she started selling toy trains on eBay.  Now she’s linked to several of those collectors all over the world.

I know many of you have found this blog not because you’re fans of my fiction but because of all the business networks out there.  I’m familiar with the online writing community, although not with all of the branches of that community—and there are countless branches, in every single city in this country (and in other countries as well).  But I’m not as familiar with the networks for realtors, even though I know a number of realtors follow this Guide, or the networks for musicians, or the networks for computer consultants.  I’m sure those networks are as vast as the networks for writers.

Because of the Guide, I have built some peripheral networks—inadvertently.  And if I need help with real estate questions or computer difficulties, I actually have some people I can turn to outside of my friends and acquaintances.  I’m also building some non-fiction business relationships due to the Guide, and gaining contacts throughout the non-fiction online community.

That’s an unexpected bonus of this Guide, certainly not one I planned on.  I’ll be discussing those peripheral networks last.  Again, if you have any insights, do let me know.

Interestingly, I’m going from this writing session into a weekend’s worth of networking.  Dean and I are holding a workshop this weekend with the help of Denise Little of Tekno Books.  More than 30 professional writers from all over the world will be at this workshop.  I’m involved in a minor way—a session on Thursday night, and then I’ll join the group for several meals.  Most of the writers will be together from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon—a great way to make contacts, help each other, and to get to know each other.

These opportunities can be difficult and tiring, particularly for writers, who are an introverted bunch. But they can also be invigorating and uplifting, a chance to move forward in unexpected ways.

I’m sure the weekend will provide more insights for the Guide. Weekends like this one often do.

Yet even with the workshop, I wouldn’t have thought of this topic without Carolyn.  So there is something else you think I need to discuss, please e-mail that as well.

Because of the network of Guide readers, this Guide is much stronger than it would have been had I just written it in the silence of my own office.  I appreciate the support from everyone who has e-mailed, commented, or donated.  You’ve kept me going on the Guide, which is still growing, despite my best efforts to wrap it up.  People who donate will get an e-version of the Guide.  When I do publish a hard copy version, it cannot be a single book, since I’m already at 130,000 words and counting.  So in addition to writing the Guide, I’m figuring out how best to present it in permanent form.  I’ll let you all know when I have that figured out.  Thanks for everything!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Networking Part One” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

One of my own personal favorites–”The Disappearance of Wicked”–appears in the March/April edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.  I think I like this story because I needed a writer’s office cat, so I inserted my own. The Goddess, as she appears in this story, was as she appeared in life–forever biting the hand that fed her, threatening the raccoons, and being her usual tough self.  She was still alive when I wrote the story, but died last May at an advanced age–at least 15, probably much older. (We’d had her 12 years, and the vet said she was at least 3.  But she had a gray muzzle and old lady habits even then, so she was probably 10.)  Anyway, there are other things in the story–children, dogs, kidnappings.  But I won’t give it all away.  Find your copy here, and enjoy!

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Goals and Dreams

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Last week, I discussed the two kinds of business plans—the kind you draw up for a financial reason (such as trying to get a loan or to lure investors), and the kind you draw up for yourself.  If you haven’t read this post, I suggest you do so, not just because it will help you understand this post, but because it will help you with your business.

In that post, I mentioned that I’d be discussing the differences between goals and dreams this week.  It actually surprises me that I haven’t done so sooner.

As I said when I started the Guide, I’m writing it out of order, partially in response to reader comments and partially in response to life itself.  As things happen around me, I put them in the Guide.  I gave myself the freedom to write out of order, even though I hadn’t initially planned to do so, because writing out of order is my normal writing method.

I rarely write anything in a linear fashion.

However, I usually finish whatever I write before I publish it.  So publishing the Guide in my normal out-of-order manner feels a bit odd to me.

At this point in the writing process, I’d go back to the first time I mentioned either “goals” or “dreams,” and I’d stick this post there.  Because it’s an important post.

I touch on goals and dreams in a lot of posts.  The post on failure, the posts on success, and the post on postponing your dreams, just to name a few.  But I never explained the difference between goals and dreams.

We use the words interchangeably. We achieve our goals, pursue our dreams.  We pursue our goals, achieve our dreams.  But goals and dreams are very different.  A shorthand way of thinking about this comes from football.

That weird little H-shaped thingie sticking out of the end zone?  It’s called a goalpost, not a dreampost.  I think football would be an entirely different game if it had a dreampost.  Hockey would be different too, if the players tried to get the puck past the dreamer.

In fact, the difference between a goalie and a dreamer are as illustrative as the difference between goalpost and dreampost.  As I go on here, playing with words, you’re starting to get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Goals, simply put, are something you achieve.  My Encarta World English Dictionary gives me five definitions of “goal.”  Four are connected to sports, including number five, which is “the end of a race.” Number four is the only non-sports related definition of the word: “something that somebody wants to achieve.”

Achieve.  We achieve our goals.  Goals are an end product.  The other definitions include phrases like “a successful attempt at…” or “the score gained…”

There are no words like “successful” or “gained” in the definition of dream.  Nor does the definition of dream include the word “achieve.”

The same dictionary gives the noun “dream” six definitions, and most of them involve sleep or inattention or thoughts.  First, of course, the dictionary discusses those visions our mind serves up when we’re sleeping.  It also discusses the daydream.

The two definitions that concern us are the third and the fourth.  I’m going to start with the fourth: “an idea or hope that is impractical or unlikely to ever be realized.”   If that were the definition of goal, then every single sports team in the world would be in trouble.  (Of course, I’ve known a few football teams bad enough to make a win an impractical hope.)

The third definition is a little more upbeat: “Something that somebody hopes, longs, or is ambitious for, usually something difficult to attain or far removed from the present circumstances.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. And since I try to be very practical in the Guide, and you all seem to recognize that, you probably think I’m going to tell you to abandon your dreams and set goals.

Nope.

Both dreams and goals are necessary for success.  You just have to understand the difference between them.

Deep down understand it.

I don’t think a freelancer can survive long without a dream.  I think the more impossible the dream the better.  See those posts on success.  If you don’t set that impossible dream high enough, you’ll achieve your dream, and stop striving.

When students apply for the Master Class that Dean and I teach (along with four other established professional writers), we ask those students what their goals are and what their secret, most impossible dream is.  The only students we take for the Master Class are those with either a professional career that has stalled (for some reason) or those with a strong work ethic who are having trouble breaking into publishing (and have excellent, professional level skills).

We look at the goals and the secret dream more than any other part of the application.  Because if the goals and the secret dream are non-existent, we have learned that the writers often don’t have the capability to survive the Master Class, let alone the business of writing itself.

What does an impossible dream add to a career?  Purpose.  Plain and simple. That dream is like the shining city on a hill, the one you can see in the distance, and you might never reach.  But until your dying day, you’ll head for that hill.

The other thing that the impossible dream adds is a sense of hope.  As long as you have something grand to strive for, you also have something grand to hope for.  Hope gets us through the dark times better than anything else.

When hope disappears, so too does drive.

Which is why it’s so hard to succeed on a long-term level if you have easily achieved dreams.  If you lack that one huge impossible dream. Because you might reach that city on the hill within the first few years of your professional career.  And then what will you do?  What will you hope for?  What will you daydream about?

I think the daydream part is also essential.  You need something to entertain your imagination while you’re working day to day.  If you’re an actor, you might spend time every day studying fancy gowns for your trip down the red carpet for your tenth Oscar nomination.  Not your first, not your fifth, your tenth.  Your impossible dream might be to have more Oscar nominations than Meryl Streep.

But if your impossible dream as an actor is to have a small part in a film—well, you might achieve that dream the day you sign up as an extra in a large crowd scene. That’s a dream you can attain in my tiny town on the Oregon Coast.  Dozens of movies have filmed here since I’ve lived here, and lots of locals have had their mugs on the screen, if only for a few seconds.  A few of the locals actually had small speaking parts.  Heck, my husband’s best friend—an attorney—had a speaking role in a commercial, filmed in Idaho.  Because of that thirty seconds on the nation’s television screens, our attorney friend is one of Idaho’s members in the Screen Actors Guild.

Had his lifelong dream been to become an actor—someone who qualified for the Screen Actors Guild—then he did so in a single outing with a single commercial. But if his lifelong dream had been to become a famous star of stage and screen, someone who had not just an Oscar, but an Emmy and a Tony, someone who had a lead role on Broadway, as well as starring roles in hit movies or hit TV shows—well, then he has a long, long way to go.

See the difference?  Even those things I listed above might not be enough for that impossible dream.  An actor might want to be considered the greatest actor of his generation.  A writer might want to have the bestselling book of all time.  A store owner might want to create the largest store franchise in the world.

And because these are dreams, not goals, it’s okay to noodle on them, to see them as a shining light in the distance, as something to work toward, but not something to count on.

Goals, on the other hand, are stepping stones.  Goals must be achievable.  Goals should build on each other.

Go back to the football analogy.  A football game in which a score is just a dream would be the dullest thing on the planet.  In fact, football players wouldn’t even have to face off. They could sit on the field, if they wanted, and imagine the score.  Of course, no one would come to the game—because there wouldn’t be a game.  Just a dream of a game.

But football is a game of inches.  It is built on phrases like “first and goal.”  The game itself sets up tiny goals that lead to a touchdown. And if the team fails in one tiny goal, then the ball goes to the other team, which then tries to achieve a series of small goals to get to the larger one.

The dream for football players isn’t to win one game.  A lot of players achieve that as early as the age of eight or ten, in a Pee-Wee Football League.  Or they have the game-winning run (or the game-winning pass) as early as the first game of their high school career.

The dream for football players is to play in the Super Bowl.  Or to win the Super Bowl. Or to be the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player—not once, but several times throughout their career.

That’s a dream that can’t be achieved without a lot of goals—small and large.  From getting on the varsity team in high school, to playing well enough to stay, to winning game after game, to play in college, to play well enough to get drafted into the National Football League, to play in the NFL (not sit on the bench), to be a part of a very good team, to win games inch by inch, yard by yard, year-in-year-out, to win a division, and to go to the big game, and then, to win it.  More than once.  Not-so-tiny goals, all leading to the big dream.

Not every professional football player makes the playoffs.  A professional football player can have a successful—a highly successful—career without ever once playing in the Super Bowl.  But if that player retires before he gets the chance to play in the biggest game of all, he will know he never did quite achieve his dream.  (I think this is why so many players try to become coaches.  They might not get to the big game as a player, but they want to try as a coach.)

A goal is “something somebody wants to achieve.”  It’s “the end of a race.”  Goals, in some ways, are the opposite of dreams.  If you set your goals too high, you’ll get discouraged and quit.  If you set your dreams too low, you’ll get discouraged and quit.

So how to do you set goals? You start with easily achievable ones.  The best diet programs are set up this way.  They don’t put you on a starvation diet of 800 calories per day.  If you’ve been eating 4,000 calories per day, the diet will reduce your intake to 3500 calories per day.  Most people can easily cut 500 calories from their diet.  That’s one giant soda or one huge specialty coffee drink or one piece of pie with ice cream. As time goes on, the calorie count goes down incrementally.  And the dieter achieves other goals—losing a pound here, fitting into her “skinny” jeans for the first time in years, getting compliments from friends on how good she looks.

However, you can’t stop with the small goals.  When you achieve a goal, another needs to take its place.  Each goal should be  a little more difficult than the last.  It’s like running a marathon:  No one can walk out the front door and run 26.2 miles without training.  No one, not even the best athletes in the world.

Most people have to walk before they run, and some people can’t even walk an entire block without getting winded.  Yet within two years, they’re able to run 26.2 miles.  They didn’t increase their distance every day.  They walked for a block until they weren’t winded. Then they walked for two. Then three.  Eventually, they walked for a few blocks and ran for 100 feet.  And on and on.

The other key to following goals is to write them down.  First you need to write down what the goal is. Then you need to keep a log, one that records your struggles to achieve that goal.  You will fail.  Be honest about those failures. Then get back up and try again, until you achieve the goal.

Sometimes the failures tell you that the early goals are too hard.  If so, cut the effort in half, and try again.

The other thing you need is a timetable.  Give yourself a realistic amount of time to achieve a goal.  Once that goal is achieved, have the next goal ready to go, along with its timetable.  This is why I tell you to have daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals.

Throw in five-year and ten-year goals as well.

Then, revamp them often.  Preferably on a monthly basis.  As you strive to achieve those goals, you will learn what is realistic for you.  No excuses.  You need to be one hundred percent honest about what you’re trying to do.

If you’re an underachiever, pay attention to how hard you work.  Make sure you’re putting in some real effort and not just slacking off.

If you’re an overachiever, make sure you don’t work too hard.

That last piece of advice comes from me, the woman who now runs about fifteen miles per week. When I started out, I didn’t pay attention to my limits (yes, overachiever), and I achieved…a stress fracture in my foot. Which would have only been a sore foot if I hadn’t been so focused on trying to keep up to the impossible goals I had set myself.  It would have become a permanently damaged foot if my husband, the former professional athlete, hadn’t had a long talk with me about knowing my own limitations (and who also dragged me to the doctor).

It’s hard to find a balance between working too hard on your goals and not working hard enough.  Which is why I tell you to reassess often.  And to be honest with yourself.  Because you’re the only who is going to know if you’re trying too hard or not trying hard enough.

The goals are stepping stones to that impossible dream. They’re the trail through the murk that will lead you to the city on the hill.

They’re also the reality check. Because the farther you get down the road, the more you should reassess.  You might not want to go to that city on the hill.  You might want to jettison your impossible dream because it’s not something you want to do any longer.

If that’s the case, then you need to find a new dream, or you will stop striving.

I know, I know, I’m speaking in metaphor here.  Let me be concrete.  One of my early impossible writing goals was to have a career like that of Nora Roberts.  But the deeper I got into the writing profession, the more I realized that Nora Roberts and I are very different writers.  I would love to have that many bestsellers and all the perks that go with it.

But Nora, for the most part, has stayed within the same genre.  She writes all aspects of that genre—romantic suspense, paranormal romance, contemporary romance, even science fiction mystery romance.  But the books all center on a couple, either falling in love or striving to maintain their love.

I have a hummingbird brain.  I can’t even read one genre for longer than a week. Asking me to write in one genre for the rest of my life would actually be a hardship.

As soon as I realized that, I had to look for a new impossible dream. Which was harder than it sounds.  Not many writers write in more than one genre.  I had to refine the dream to be something that suited me.  I’ve refined several times since then.  I still have impossible dreams—but none of them entail writing in the same genre book after book after book.

I reassessed.

If I had wanted a career similar to Nora Roberts’s career, I would have had to change my goals. I would have had to write novels in only one genre (although I could’ve branched into all the subgenres), and I would have had to have had small goals along the way—writing a contemporary, writing a paranormal (oh, I’ve done that), writing a romantic suspense novel (I’ve done that too!), writing a historical….

You get the picture.  My imagination is too dark to sustain a happily ever after ending book after book.  My sense of whimsy is too powerful to write dark novels book after book.  My mind sees too many future possibilities to keep me out of science fiction for too long.  But I love to dig deeply into the modern world as well.

I’m not suited for the first city on the hill that I headed toward.  However, I’ve found others that suit me better.

If you think of goals as markers along the way toward your impossible dream, then you’ve got the right philosophy.  If you confuse goals with dreams, then you’re going to get stuck.

Imagine something grand for yourself.

Then figure out how to achieve it.  If achieving it takes only hard work—if there isn’t a little bit of luck and timing involved—then you haven’t found your impossible dream yet. Because an impossible dream should have an element of the impossible to it.  An element of being in the right place at the right time.

Know too, that you might never achieve that dream—and that’s okay. Because you’re going to be disappointed when you get to that city.  It’ll never ever measure up to your imagination.  So as you’re on the final road toward your dream, make sure there’s a new one waiting in the wings.

And then plan those stepping stones that will get you to your next city on the hill.  Set your goals.

Goals are the only thing that will lead to your dream.  All of your dreams.

Even those that might never come true.

I never dreamed I’d enjoy writing nonfiction again.  But I am.  And my weekly posts are little goals, which enable me to finish something I’d hoped to write for years.

I’ve appreciated all the help you’ve given me on this journey.  The comments, e-mails, and discussions are great. The donations help me take the time to write the Guide.  And remember, anyone who donates will get an e-version of the Guide when I’m done.

If there are topics I’ve missed, do let me know.  I can see the finish line on this project—the goal, if you will.  So if I’m missing anything, now is the time to let me know.

And thanks for everything.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Goals and Dreams” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Business Plan

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In some ways, this is an ironic post, because I have reached a point in my life where I’ve realized that most plans don’t work. What I envisioned for myself as an 18-year-old wannabe writer has not happened.  What has happened are things that I never could have imagined.  Even my somewhat more realistic visions from my 25-year-old post Clarion Writers Workshop self  have not quite happened the way I expected.

From the vantage point of 1985, I never would have thought I’d be sitting here.

Of course, if I took my 25-year-old self and showed her my life, she’d be awed and thrilled and she’d be happy she achieved it, although she would ask why I had not achieved some of her wilder dreams.  Some simply aren’t possible in 2010.  I decided some weren’t for me.  And a few, well, I’m hoping I’ll achieve them in the future.

So as I sit here, with a deep understanding of how futile planning is in a career in the arts, I also realize the importance of a business plan.

You may all go “huh?” in unison now.

Business planning is important, no matter what you do as a freelancer.  Yet you need to be flexible and understand that your plan is simply that: a plan.  And like all plans in the movies, it never quite goes the way the protagonists think it should.

Business plans come in a variety of forms.  Some business plans are required.  In the early 1980s, my then-husband and I wanted to open a frame shop and art gallery.  He had a lot of experience with custom framing, and he’d operating a frame shop out of our home for a year.  He had made some money.  And then, we figured (for reasons now lost to the mists of time), that we needed to open a store front.

We did what all broke former college students do, we applied for a loan. First we went to our bank.  Credit was as tough then as it is now, and so the bank (nicely, because banks were nice way back then) declined to loan us money.

So we went to the Small Business Administration and applied for an SBA loan for $60,000.  (Boy, that number makes me shudder these days.)  The SBA required financial records, and a business plan. We had no idea what a business plan was. The SBA nicely supplied us with a form, which we filled out.

I’m sure some version of that form is online now.  You can find other versions of business plan forms in accounting software and in self-help books.  I’m not going to supply one here, except to talk about it briefly.  If you need something like that for your new business, then I would suggest you cobble one together from a variety of forms, just to cover all your bases.

In essence, what the SBA had us do was project five years of income.  We had to justify that income—we couldn’t just pull numbers out of our butt.  We justified our projected income based on my former husband’s sales for the previous year out of our home, and the yearly sales at the two frame shops that had employed him before he started the home store.

Then we had to extrapolate that income to a store front, with advertising and good traffic.  We had to show how other businesses in our area did—not just frame shops, but other businesses in the strip mall where we hoped to open the store.  We had to understand the traffic patterns, the number of possible clients, and the way that all became sales.

When we finished our educated guesswork, we had to turn to our expenses.  We knew what the rent and utilities would be. We knew what we would pay our single employee.  (And here’s where times were different: we could afford to provide health coverage for a retail job.  The coverage was a minor expense back then. <sigh>)  We knew what our supplies would cost.  Framing was easy—our expenses were a percentage of each order.  The customer chose the design, and then we ordered the supplies.  We had mat board and mounting boards on hand, but  mostly, we had no up front supply costs. It was all sixty-to-ninety days after we ordered the material.

The only expense we had was the art itself, and we got a lot of the original work on commission. We bought posters at a discount so that browsers had things to frame, and we did frame up some of our favorites.

As for the equipment, we already owned the expensive stuff for the in-home business. So our expenses were pretty low.  Where did that $60,000 number come from? Two years of operating costs, plus some cushion for our own salaries, etc.

The SBA came through with a loan…of $20,000.  Which my ex promptly turned down, without consulting me. He then gave the business plan to his father, who funded us, which turned out to be one of those colossal mistakes, mostly because of our naiveté.  I think now if we had taken the leaner, meaner SBA loan, we’d have worked harder and we might still have a business.

Not, mind you, that I’d rather be doing that than this.

The SBA looked at our business plan, found problems with it, particularly in the overly optimistic estimates of income, and decided to fund us for a year.  They then cut our salaries, and that’s where they got the $20,000 number.

Which isn’t bad.  They were wrong on the income—we had a lot of traffic: my ex was good at what he did, and had a lot of loyal customers from the moment the shop opened.  But they were right about the hidden expenses.

And that, I’m sure, comes from looking at countless business plans from countless businesses, all built on hope and fear and guestimates.

If you haven’t opened your small business yet—be that as a freelance writer or a frame shop owner, a pediatrician or a tow truck driver—then write up a business plan as if you were applying for a loan. Download those documents, design the right one for you, then do the research and be honest with yourself.

Don’t fudge the numbers.  If you can’t get the income to outweigh the expenses by being honest, then you probably aren’t ready to go freelance.  See the seven posts I wrote about money, because it is in financial planning that most freelance businesses go belly up.

Full disclosure:  I have never done that type of business plan for my writing business.  I have done it for all the others, from Pulphouse Publishing to the collectibles store that Dean opened a few years ago (and sold at a profit).

Why haven’t I done it for the writing? For two reasons.  Writing, like many other businesses in the arts, is too by-guess-and-by-golly.  I can tell you my sell-through for my short fiction (90% within a year of finishing a story; 99% within ten years of finishing), but I can’t tell you how much a single story will earn.  I wrote a story in August that got rejected by the anthology editor who commissioned it (with a very nasty note), then turned the story around and sold it for seven times what the original editor had promised me.  Some short stories have earned me tens of thousands of dollars. Others have earned a few hundred.  Unlike a piece of glass or perfectly cut mat board, a short story has no fixed value.

And a short story earns for years, as do novels.  I just resold two of my Grayson novels that I wrote ten years ago.  When you sell a picture frame, you cannot earn money from the same picture frame years later.   It’s sold and it’s gone.

I also can’t tell you about the traffic a single story will get.  I can point to similar stories, and the readership of various magazines, but I can’t tell you how many of those people will read my story, and what it means if they do.  It’s easier with books—you can guess from previous sales what future sales might be like.

But books are not like pens.  You can’t mass produce books.  My friend Karen Joy Fowler had a string of well-written midlist books that paid well, but not great.  So you’d think, from her track record, that she’s always publish mid-list books.

One day, at a book signing, she looked across the bookstore and saw two signs.  One read Jane Austen.  The other, with an arrow pointing toward a back room, read Book Club.  In that flash of inspiration we writers rely on, she combined both signs to The Jane Austen Book Club.  Then she wrote a kick-ass novel, with that as the title.

The book arrived at her publisher’s in the  middle of the Jane Austen craze, as book clubs were gaining traction.  Plus everyone in the publishing house loved the book.  Word of mouth proved terrific, and The Jane Austen Book Club hit the New York Times bestseller list, and got made into a movie.

In no way, could Karen realistically have done a business plan that showed how The Jane Austen Book Club would take her little freelance business from a boutique store off the beaten path to a well respected popular store on Fifth Avenue in New York City.  No loan administrator would have given her a second look.  No publisher would have believed her—not without reading the book itself.  The title might’ve been great, but the book had to live up to that title, which it did.

So why am I, a dedicated freelance writer who knows her business very well, talking about business plans if I say they’re not relevant for many businesses?  Because that financial guestimation business plan, the kind you need to get a loan or to attract venture capital or to round up a few friends to give you back-up funds, is only one kind of business plan.

The rest of this post will be about the other kind of business plan: the kind you draw up for yourself.  Now I’m not talking about goals and dreams.  We’ll talk more in-depth about those next week and the week after.

What I’m talking about here is survival plain and simple.  Because without a business plan, your freelance business will not survive.

Again, I hear the chorus of “huh?”  ”Lady,” you’re all saying, “you started this whole post saying that plans go awry, that you can’t foresee the future, that your freelance business doesn’t have a formal business plan.”

Yep.  And yet I have an informal one.

Go back to some of the earlier posts, like the one on discipline. Freelancers have two big problems: time and organization.  When you quit your day job, you feel like you have a limitless amount of time ahead of you.  You have all day to accomplish various tasks. But you lose the job’s structure, so often days go by without accomplishing anything.

The same happens with organization. At a day job, someone organizes you—they tell you when to arrive, when to leave, when to eat lunch, where to sit, and what to do.  When you freelance, you decide all those things.  Which sounds lovely—in theory.  In practice, it’s a recipe for disaster.

To survive these things, you’ll need discipline.  You’ll also need to learn how to structure yourself (which is a future topic). And you’ll need an informal business plan.

Your informal business plan is nothing like the one you’d prepare for the SBA. This plan is for your eyes only.  But, like the SBA plan, this business plan must be realistic.

Your plan can only include things which you can control.  For example, I know that 90% of my short stories will sell in the first year.  Do I know which stories they are? No.  Do I know which story will take ten years to sell? No.  Do I know which story will pay me $10,000 and which one will pay me $100? No.

What I do know is that if I finish a story and mail it, it has a nine out of ten chance of selling within one year of the mail date. So I must a) write short stories and b) keep them in the mail.

I can control those two things.  I cannot control editors (dammit).  Nor can I control readers.  I can’t predict which story will make my name and which one will disappear without a trace.

So, using what I can control, here’s how I build my personal business plan.  I decide how many stories I’ll write this year.  That decision will be based on how long it takes me to write 1000 words, and how many words I will dedicate to my short fiction writing.  So if I write 1000 words in an hour, then a 4000 word story will take me four hours minimum.  Figure six to count in false starts, overwriting, rewriting, and general noodling.  Most of my stories are longer than 4K, however, so I tend to figure as a good average 10K.  I figure how many 10K stories I want to write, how many novels I want to write, and I divide by hours.  I then figure out how much time I need to devote to writing each and every day.

(Like this: Let’s say that my estimate shows me that I need to write 20,000 words per week for my writing plan. That means I must spend 20 hours per week at 1000 words per hour writing.  If I write 500 words an hour, I’ll spend 40 hours at it.)

I also need to factor in mailing time—and remailing time, since most stories do not sell on their first time out.  Some writers set aside an entire workday for mailing once a  month.  I try to keep up with whatever I have on a weekly basis, keeping everything in the mail.  That too becomes part of the plan.  Nothing stays on my desk. Everything leaves the office, one way or another.

Your business plan should include hours to work each week, the amount you need to accomplish, and which projects you plan to do.  You need to factor in things like time spent rounding up new work. (In a specialty store, that would be included in advertising and promotions; in writing it can be query letters and sending chapters to editors; in certain kinds of sales, it might be the number of cold calls you’ll need to make each and every week.)  You’ll need to find your Goldilocks solution: you don’t want to work too much, but you also don’t want to work too little.  You want your work schedule to be just right.

Even having concrete weekly goals is not enough to keep you producing day in and day out, particularly if you work at a solitary freelance job like writing.  Your business plan should divide up by quarters (how much do you expect to get done by March 31?), and by year.  You’ll need a target for this year, for five years from now, and for ten years from now.

And no, your business plan can’t include things like sell more copies of books than Dan Brown.  Or turn your little coffee shop into the next international franchise coffee business (like Starbucks) by the year 2020.  You can’t control those things.

You can control how hard you try.

“But,” you’re all reminding me, “you say that plans go awry. How can you plan ten years out?”

You need to, to keep yourself on track. But you also need to revise your business plan regularly.  If you take a left turn, like Karen Joy Fowler did with The Jane Austen Book Club, then you assess your business plan with the new direction in mind.

At the end of your year, reassess the plan. Did you achieve your daily, weekly, and monthly goals? If you didn’t, why didn’t you? If you did, were your goals too easy? Or were they just right?  Did you work hard enough? Or did you hardly work at all?

Be honest with yourself.

Then write a new business plan, with new targets, reflecting your current realities.

I would suggest that you keep the plans in two files: one on your computer, and one in hardcopy file folder.  After ten years, it’s amusing to look at old business plans. Some are very, very accurate.  Some aren’t.  If you keep detailed notes, you’ll know what works for you and what doesn’t.  You won’t keep reinventing the wheel.

The nice thing about an informal business plan is this: You’ve created your own road to walk on.  You’re not flailing in the dark.  You’re actually on a path toward success.  You may decide that particular path isn’t for you, and you might blaze a new trail.  But you’ll be moving forward with a purpose, rather than hoping and waiting for someone else to do something that will propel you along.

Will you be where you thought you’d be ten years from now? I can guarantee that you won’t.  But if you follow your own plan, you might be in an even better position than you imagined you’d be.

And you will certainly have had an enjoyable journey.

If someone had told me ten years ago that I’d be writing a long blog post on my website every week, asking for donations, and using it all to create a nonfiction book, I would have asked, “What happened to the publishing industry?” Ten years ago, writing and posting something would’ve been fruitless at best, destructive at worst.  No publisher would’ve considered a blog-book, and few readers would’ve donated to support one.

I wasn’t even sure last April when I started it that it would work. You all have shown me that it does.  The discussions are good and are improving the book, the e-mails keep me on the straight-and-narrow, and those of you who have donated have made this financially worthwhile as well.  I’ll be sending everyone who donated an e-copy of the book when I’m done.  Whether you’ve donated or not, however, you’ve contributed a great deal—and proved my point, above.  We don’t know where we’re going to end up, but if we work hard, it’s usually a better place than we initially planned. Thanks.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Business Plan” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Role Models

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The past few weeks, we’ve had a pretty lively discussion of behavior and the professional freelancer.  If you haven’t done so, go back and read the comments sections in the two posts on jealousy and in last week’s post on courtesy.

In addition to those comments, I’ve received great e-mails from folks, some detailing terrible behavior by professionals, and some discussing some absolutely wonderful behavior.  It’s nice to see the upside, considering how egregious some of the downsides were.  Thanks for sharing, everyone.

I’ve been thinking about this all week, particularly the kafuffle that has appeared on some boards (and in some blog posts) still defending envy as a learning tool, and trying to discuss envy in ways that make it less harmful.

I finally came to the conclusion that we’re mixing apples and cats here.  What’s going on is twofold.  First, we as freelancers need role models because most of us do not have a training program that teaches us how to run our business. And second, we’re not sure how to behave when a friend whom we thought of as a peer leapfrogs us and achieves one (or many) of our goals.

I’m going to deal with both issues in this post.  Most of this will be about role models from two different sides—why we create them and what happens when we become one.

We all have role models, even those of us who have gone through some kind of professional training before we open our own businesses.  It’s the nature of human beings.  Anyone who has watched a child visibly mimic an adult knows that this is hardwired in our species, maybe even in mammals. I remember watching one of my nieces at the age of three or so try (and fail) to copy my mother’s sitting position.  Mom was wearing a dress and had her legs crossed at the ankles and twisted to the side like a debutante.  My niece could cross her legs at the ankles but she couldn’t handle the twist, and she nearly fell off the chair as she tried to reproduce the entire look.

I just watched my youngest cat do the same thing with the oldest cat in the house.  The young cat spent most of a month trying to learn how to sleep on her back, all four paws in the air.  She couldn’t get the balance right. She’d look at the older cat, then try to achieve the exact same position.

My youngest cat does everything the oldest cat does, in the exact same way, clearly modeling herself on the Queen of the House.  The oldest cat is our most successful cat—every other cat is afraid of her and lets her do exactly what she wants—and clearly the youngest cat sees her as an authority on everything.  We have photos of our oldest cat doing the same thing with her role model, the charismatic alpha male who ran our household more than a decade ago.

So the modeling behavior is built in.  We all do it, especially when we don’t have a clear path to follow.  We try to invent a path from scratch, using our understanding of someone else’s path to pave our own.

I underlined that last part for a reason.  We don’t know someone else’s path exactly, nor could we replicate it properly even if we tried. The differences come in personality, background, environment, and in the world itself.

There’s a beautiful example of this type of modeling in the movie, Julie and Julia.  (If you haven’t seen the film and care about spoilers, skip the rest of this paragraph and the next two paragraphs.)  Julie Powell chooses Julia Child as her role model, deciding to cook every recipe in The Art of French Cooking in the space of a year.  (If you’ve ever looked at this cookbook, you know what a daunting task that is.)  Powell’s obsession with Julia Child, as portrayed in the film, goes to dressing in 1950s/60s attire, mimicking one of the dinner parties that Child held, and in reading everything she could about her role model.  Powell makes pronouncements about who she believes Child to be—thinking that Julia Child would never have been defeated by a flawed soufflé, Julia Child would never have burst into tears about a burned dinner—and uses those pronouncements to change herself and buck herself up.

I found that part of the film fascinating, because the Julia Child I remember was a buffoonish woman who often appeared on television drunk.  I remembered thinking that Dan Ackroyd’s imitation of Julia Child on Saturday Night Live wasn’t that different from the real thing, since I never saw the early Julia Child, the one who changed a nation’s cooking habits.

But be that as it may, the imagined Julia Child became important to Julie Powell—and helped her through some very difficult times.  Then Powell’s quest made the news, she sold a book, and some reporter asked Child what she thought of Powell.  And Child said she did not approve. The reporter told Powell to get her reaction.  She didn’t give any reaction over the phone, but the very idea shattered her.  The climax of Powell’s story in the film deals with the loss of the dream of approval by her role model.

Which I can understand.  I learned a long time ago that people’s public personas are very different from their private ones.  Perhaps that’s because I was groped constantly as a cute young reporter by major politicians who thought touching me was their due.  Or maybe it was because at Clarion Writers Workshop,  I learned that writers are nothing like their writing.  You can’t tell who someone is by what parts of themselves they put forward for public view.

Those realizations didn’t stop me from having role models.  It just stopped me from wanting to meet them and getting disillusioned.  I’ve met a few of my writing role models over the years, and in all instances I’ve acted like a complete dork. I couldn’t talk to two of them—me, the former broadcaster, the woman who can talk to anyone (and has).  I couldn’t get a word out of my mouth.

I have fled from a few others, and I’ve vacated the room before my biggest role model showed up at an event at a speaking engagement.  Can’t, won’t, don’t wanna deal.  Just don’t.

Why don’t I want to meet someone I’ve admired from afar for years? Because, like Julie Powell in Julie and Julia, I don’t want my image of my role model shattered.  Because I have needed that image over the years.  It was one of those pillars on which I built my career.

Here’s how I see it:  As I said above, most freelance careers are put together by observation and pluck.  We have no guidelines.  We make our own rules.  So we try to find someone to emulate, someone whose career we claim we want, someone who is doing what we want to do and doing it well.  Then we walk the same path—or what we imagine to be the same path—as our role model, struggling to survive, telling ourselves stories about our imaginary companion.  Clearly, we say, this problem didn’t bother our role model when really, how do we know?  Publicly it didn’t bother our role model, or maybe our role model never experienced the same problem.  We have no idea.

But we use that handhold to pick ourselves up and keep going.

The role models become not just a beacon on a dark road, but a railing that we use to pull ourselves up.  And for those of us who become successful, it works.  Whatever we tell ourselves about these role models becomes part of our stories, whether it’s true for the role model or not.

We’re using the outlines of a real person to build a fictional person—a kind of spirit guide for our careers, for lack of a better metaphor.  And then we follow that guide as far as we possibly can.

I think this is what some of you folks were talking about when you were discussing the importance of envy.  And I think you were using the wrong word.  You—we all—need someone to emulate.  There’s a line in a Paul Simon song that has reached out to me this past year: what do we do when our role model is gone?  When we’ve outgrown that role model?

Some of us find another.

I would reckon it’s rather hard for someone of Paul Simon’s level of success to find another role model.  Especially one in his own industry.  Because Simon himself has become a role model for hundreds, maybe thousands of others.

Which segues to the next part of this section.  Eventually, as we become successful in the various parts of our lives, we will become a role model for someone else.

That’s a tough position to be in, as Michael Phelps learned in 2008 when he got photographed taking a hit off a bong.  Tiger Woods is learning the same lesson right now.  A lot of people, including my husband, are very disappointed in him. While Dean’s upset about the way Tiger has hurt golf (Dean used to be a professional golfer), a lot of parents are upset because this seemingly upstanding role model had a secret double life.

We all have secret lives.  Those lives may not be as dramatic as Tiger’s (my mind boggles at keeping all those relationships straight!), but they are private and they are ours.

The problem with being a role model is that the people who look up to us don’t see us as entirely human.  Look at the section above. Role models are imagined—taken from the shape of another person, but not actually that other person. So in no way can someone who looks up to you know exactly who you are.

And it’s not your responsibility to tell them.  I think some of the disillusionment in the Professional Courtesy section—including my own examples—comes from the disconnect between the imagined and the real.  You, as a role model, can’t prevent the disappointment, although you can be courteous to the person who admires you.  Respect that little bit of what Dean calls the gosh-wows.  Something that you did or suggested or implied became important to the person before you.  You don’t even need to know what that something was (and you probably don’t want to know).  But you should understand that whatever it was, it had an impact on the other person.  Treat them gently.

I’ve watched a lot of people try to make themselves into just another human being to the fan in front of them, and the fan deny what they’re hearing.  I think you’re better off saying thank you and letting them ask questions—if any.  If they do ask, answer honestly.  But if they don’t, don’t volunteer.

Of course, here I’m dealing with someone you don’t know.  All of us become role models to people we do know.  And sometimes we become active role models—parents are automatically role models for their children, and often so are older siblings or extended family members.  Then it is your obligation to pay attention, to try to be the best you can, whatever that means—and within the realm of being a person as well.

I think one of the most important aspects of being a role model is showing that, as humans, we  have flaws and we do make mistakes. But we try to correct the mistakes, and to grow as human beings.

You can’t be that kind of role model to a stranger, but you certainly can to children or the people around you.

I think the trickiest position to be in, however, is not a person who needs a role model (in other words, all of us) or the person who is a role model (most of us), but the person who watches a friend cross from peer to success.

When you work in the arts, like I do, or in some very difficult endeavor, like national politics, you often do not have role models nearby.  If you want to be successful on an international level, like I did, or to have a lifetime career in an area that chews people up, like I do, then you won’t find a lot of role models in your own backyard (unless you’re lucky enough to be raised in one of those families like the Bridges family—you know, Lloyd Bridges, Jeff Bridges, Beau Bridges—a family with a history of success in a particular industry).  You have to make strangers your role models, which leads to a lot of imaginary role models like the ones I described above.

I met my first professional writer in college, poet Galway Kinnell, who turned out to be a wonderful, generous man—at least with college students.  Most of the writers I met, with the exception of the Canadian literary writer I mentioned last week, were gracious and very giving of their time.  They were the first actual people I met who had some measure of success in my dream job.

But I had wanted to be a professional fiction writer for nearly ten years before I met my first fiction writer.  So I developed a lot of role models, from bits and pieces of public information about my favorite writers.  And I cobbled together a career path that has alternately worked and hurt me.  It worked because it gave me a way to walk, and hurt because I can’t achieve what they achieved.  No one has the same career as someone else—and certainly not on the same timetable.  As a musician friend of mine said woefully when he turned 40, “I’ve lived longer than Mozart, and I’m not one-one-hundredth as successful.”

Yep.  I’ve felt that way at times, and that’s when the role model thing hurts.  Of course, we never look at the downside of our role models.  Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave.  I doubt he thought of himself as a success at the very end.

When you design your own role models as many of us do, then you get used to the idea that they’re imaginary.  That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to meet a few of my earliest role models.  I don’t want the real person to impinge upon the imagined.

The problem is when the idea of success becomes imaginary too.

As freelancers, a lot of us work in professions that are “too hard to succeed in,” or “impossible to make a living at.” We’re “not strong enough” to handle the difficulties, “not special enough” to get noticed, “not talented enough” to climb to the top.  We really should “give up” and “get a real job” and stop “daydreaming” or “wasting time” or “fooling around.”

These attitudes, from well-meaning friends and family, are so common that most successful people cite them in their autobiographies or in interviews or in songs (my favorite of which is by George Thorogood and the Destroyers, “Get a Haircut and Get a Real Job.”)  These phrases add to the idea that success is illusory, impossible, and unattainable.

Yet we continue to try, because we’re following a dream.

We find other people who are trying, and we band together—a group of hobbits against an impossible foe.

And then, one day, one of our little band breaks out.  They sell a story or they open a shop or they win an election.  They achieve a measure of success.

Success that, until this moment, has been illusory.

And suddenly, the rest of us have a dilemma.  Because this takes our little quest from the realm of illusion into the realm of reality.  The success of one of our peers challenges all of our assumptions, the greatest of which exist in our imagination.

Think about this: Imaginary role models—that we know, down in our heart of hearts, aren’t the real person; impossible success—that we believe, deep down, we’ll probably never achieve and that’s okay; the important thing is the journey, or so we say.

And then—the success becomes real.  A real person, a person we know, achieves it.  That person is not and never has been a role model. That person is a friend or at least a compatriot.  A person whom we’ve seen at her best and at her worst, a person with flaws, who doesn’t always react well to criticism or who isn’t as talented as we are.  A person who clearly isn’t perfect, any  more than the rest of us in our merry little band.

So what have they gone and done? They’ve shattered our illusions.  And that’s why we often react badly to them.  Not because we’re jealous or envious.  But because we’re scared.

Rather than show us the path, they’ve blurred it.  Rather than becoming superhuman as they achieved the impossible, they achieved it while remaining their imperfect, very human selves.

They knocked the railing out from underneath us, destroyed the underpinning of our belief system.

Some of us bounce back from this better than others.  Some of us have been disillusioned enough in our lives to understand how to rebuild.  But for some of us, this is the first time we’ve seen behind the curtain, the first time that we realized the Great Oz is just a guy from Kansas, blown in on a storm like the rest of us.

What most of us don’t do is step outside ourselves, and start asking, Just how did a guy from Kansas become the Great Oz?  How did he survive in this strange and hostile world? What’s he doing that I’m not doing?

It’s hard to step from illusion to reality.  But that’s part of growing up, as both a person and as a freelancer. Eventually, you have to realize that you’re walking on your own path, one you’ve been forging from the very first time you figured out your dream, and you have to value that path.  You’re a trailblazer in your own life, whether you want to be or not.

I still have role models.  But I tend not to idealize them any longer.  Instead, I take bits and pieces from a lot of them.  I want to write for at least as many decades as Jack Williamson did.  I want to die at my desk, a working (and still publishing) writer, like Robert B. Parker did last month.  I want to continually improve my skills like both Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates do.

In other words, I’m still creating an imaginary role model, but the shape I’m using is my own.  The bits and pieces I use to create it are inspired by other writers, and other artists, and other businesspeople.

I know that disillusionment is part of the business, but I try not to stay disillusioned for long.  And when I find something that disappoints, I try to remove it from my imaginary role model and substitute something else.

Which makes me—and my imaginary role model—a work in progress.

Which is as it should be, I guess.

I’m just feeling my way around this Guide, trying to figure out what’s important and what isn’t.  You folks have helped tremendously with that.  I have a hunch that had I written this as a nonfiction book with no input from outside, it would have been less interesting and a lot less challenging for me.

So thanks for the comments, e-mails, and the donations. Remember that I’ll give an e-copy of the Guide to anyone who donates, when this thing is done, which is taking a while partly because of the interactivity (not a complaint!) and partly because I keep thinking of more stuff to tell you.  Thanks, everyone!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Role Models” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I’m also doing some very dishy research, so I’m reading a lot of salacious downmarket books from the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  I’ve about had it with exclamation points!Yes! Honestly! That’s true! I do feel like a gossip maven, even though everyone I have gossip about is dead…

Here are the few memorable books I read in December.

December, 2009

Bray, Libba, A Great and Terrible Beauty, Delacorte, 2003.  Oh, how times change.  I put off reading this book a dozen times because the early back cover copy did not mention the supernatural.  In fact, I kept confusing the book with the Luxe series, partly because of the cover.

I missed a marvelous treat.  This is a gothic novel, the good old-fashioned kind.  Only without the dark brooding hero. Gemma Doyle grows up in India, but when her mother gets murdered, Gemma moves to England and goes to a boarding school that makes Hogwarts look gimicky.  Wonderful scary stuff, much of it to do with trust (but isn’t that what all Gothics are about?).  Highly recommended.

Brenner, Marie, “Anatomy of a Siege,” Vanity Fair, November, 2009.  A long article about the terrorist take-over of the Mumbai hotels in 2008, which is also called India’s 9/11.  Brenner also deals with the aftermath—what happened in Indian culture because of those events.  Terrible stuff and oddly fascinating because of the cultural differences between the U.S. and India.

There were, of course, pockets of heroism—things we didn’t hear as this siege occurred.  Some amazing quick-thinking people managed to save many lives.  Fascinating, frightening stuff, about the new century that we all live in.

Buckley, Christopher, Losing Mum and Pup, Kindle edition, 2009.  Christopher Buckley is the son of William F. Buckley.  Christopher is also a wonderful satirist, whose fiction I’ve enjoyed immensely.  I also liked his father’s spy novels as well as his columns, even though William F. and I almost never agreed.

I read an excerpt of this book in Vanity Fair, and realized I had to read the entire thing.  Buckley’s parents were famous—both of them. His mother was a famous socialite, and his father was, of course, William F.  This book isn’t so much about them as it is about losing our parents.  Christopher’s died within a year of each other, a harrowing year for him, since he was an only child.

His writing is conflicted and honest.  His mother sounded a lot like mine—a woman who never could quite tell the truth about anything.  Only Christopher figured that out about his mother at a young age; I didn’t figure that out about mine until I was in my thirties.  (He says this tendency of hers inspired him to write fiction.  Hm, wonder if that happened to me as well.) It’s the first time I’d ever encountered anyone else with a mother who had a loose relationship with the truth, and that part of the book alone was spellbinding for me.

But on the merits and not on the personal side, this book is very well done.  Heartbreaking and funny.  The e-mails he sent out during one of his father’s illnesses were wonderful.  Since I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail updates lately about sick close friends, I’m (unfortunately) gaining an appreciation for the form, and Buckley’s were interesting, sad, frightened, and funny.

If you’ve ever lost someone close—or even if you haven’t—this is the book for you.

Cach, Lisa, “Puddings, Pastries, and Thou,” Wish List, Leisure, 2003.  I have no idea where I got this anthology, which also features Lisa Kleypas, Claudia Dain, and Lynsay Sands, but I read it for two reasons: First, I’m still puttering through my Kleypas binge, and second, I always read a Christmas romance anthology over the holidays.

I have to say, though, that I really hated the design of this book.  It doesn’t do what romance anthologies (heck, all anthologies) should, which is point you to the authors’ other work.  In fact, the stories themselves have no byline.  You have to look at the table of contents to see who wrote what.

The Cach story was a nice surprise.  I’ve probably read two dozen such anthologies over the years and the stories are often sweet but predictable.  This one wasn’t predictable.  I’ve discovered Mary Balogh through such an anthology, and now I’ll seek out other work by Cach.

This is a witty story of a down-and-out woman whose immediate family was dead and who depends on the kindness of her distant relations.  Only they stuck her with an elderly woman who had either dementia or Alzeheimers (of course, the story doesn’t say since it’s set in Regency England).  She was the 24/7 caretaker, and she barely had time for herself. She also barely got enough to eat.

When the story begins, our heroine Vivian has just moved in with another set of distant relatives, and must contend with a jealous 17-year-old who is about to debut. I’m all set for a Mean Girls story—the 17-year-old doesn’t want to share her glory days with a lesser cousin—but the story doesn’t work that way.

The 17-year-old does set Vivian up with a seemingly undesirably hero, who is a bad influence not because he’s a rake or an alcoholic, but because…well, let me simply say that it has to do with morals that no longer exist.  He had done something honorable in our world, but dishonorable in theirs.

The entire story centers around the feasts over the holiday, and Cach delineates them with loving care.  It’s pretty clear that Vivian will go from being a bony distant relation to a fat lord’s wife, and we’re cheering for her the whole way.

And the story made me hungry for pastries. Enough said.

Esquire Staff, “The Language of Men,” Esquire, November, 2009.  An utterly fun series of articles about words—particularly words men should and shouldn’t use.  The best part is “The Esquire Lexicon: Common Words to Use More Often, Words to Discard And Suggested Usage” which includes things like “sweet” about which they say “Only when talking about food.” (It also comes with a chart: Biblical Figures Who Can Be Invoked as “Sweet” If Need Be.) Or “bro” about which they say simply, “No.”  The list of profanity alternatives is also fun, but not nearly creative enough, imho.  Click the link above and have a good laugh. (In fact, you can click the link on most if not all of the mentioned articles in the Recommended Reading sections of my blog and find the article.)

Hogan, Michael, “Our Man Dominick,” Vanity Fair, November, 2009.  A tribute to Vanity Fair’s late columnist, Dominick Dunne, who died in August.  I loved Dunne’s work and was sorry to hear about his death.  This tribute is both heartfelt and honest, talking about the man that the editors of the magazine worked with for two decades.

Dunne himself was amazing.  He wrote six novels, a few nonfiction books, and hundreds of articles for Vanity Fair including 67 monthly diary enteries (or columns) in the eight years after he had been diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed him which was, as Hogan says, “a remarkable feat for a man in his 70s and 80s writing for a magazine that comes out only twelve times per year.”

Dunne didn’t even begin writing until he had a great personal and public collapse as a Hollywood producer at the age of 50.  He was just getting his feet underneath him when his daughter Dominique was murdered.  He had been searching for justice ever since.

Take a peek at this article for a fascinating glimpse of a working writer, and an odd one in that Dunne didn’t mind celebrity. In fact, he courted it.  Amazing how many fascinating influential people we lost in 2008.  Dunne was one of them.

Holden, Anthony, Behind The Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards, 1993.  This book is obviously dated—it’s nearly 20 years old!—and I was reading it as research for another project.  On the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, it’s unreliable, particularly when Holden talks about the way that Spielberg will always be too tainted to win an Oscar, and how Julia Roberts is a passing fad.  But on the history of the Oscars itself, this book is marvelous fun.  He covers the voting scandals from the awards’ 1920s inception to the modern era, and the 1930s stuff is particularly nasty fun.  Worth picking up if you can find an old copy.  Ignore his predictions and read about the past.

Kamp, David, “Norman Rockwell’s American Dream,” Vanity Fair, November 2009.  Wow, did I learn a lot about Norman Rockwell while reading this article.  I’ve always liked Rockwell, something my “cultured” friends tried to make me ashamed of.  Kamp explains why Rockwell was considered “lowbrow” and how that’s changing.  But even more importantly, he talks about what makes Rockwell’s work so striking.

However, in that a picture is worth 1000 words category, what makes this article work are the paintings side by side with the photographic studies he used to help him paint the paintings.  The first that you see, After the Prom, stopped me cold.  The photograph that he took is very, very similar to the painting—the models he used greatly resemble the painted figures and they’re in a similar position.  But the painting is alive.  It just jumps off the page, where the photograph is static and clearly posed.

I showed this to Dean and what he said as he looked at it, as stunned as I was, was, “The painting tells a story.”  Indeed it does.  And more than that, the figures aren’t figures. They’re characters in that story, with an agenda, and opinions, and goals.  Amazing, amazing work, which makes me want to buy the Rockwell books he discusses in the article—which has to be part of the point.

Mockenhaupt, Brian, “We’ve Seen The Future And It’s Unmanned,” Esquire, November 2009.  A behind-the-scenes look at unmanned drones that are doing much of the fighting for us in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Not a political article at all—just informational, and utterly fascinating.  It reminds me of “Ender’s Game,” Orson Scott Card’s award-winning short story, first published in Omni nearly thirty years ago.  For once, science fiction did predict the future—and it’s…well…wow.

Putney, Mary Jo, Loving a Lost Lord, Kensington, 2009.  Mary Jo Putney is back, writing straight historicals.  She has an interesting set of four men who are not your typical Regency heroes.  She starts with Adam, who suffers amnesia in a shipping accident.  This is physiologically correct amnesia—it’s temporary, and it slowly eases in the proper manner—which makes it all that much more interesting.  My only quibbles with the novel (MJ!) is that the ship was named Enterprise and our hero has a valet named Wharf.  As a Star Trek writer, this threw me out of the story every time. But most folks will appreciate the homage, if they catch it at all.  Pick it up before the next in the series appears in the spring.

Stewart, James B., “Eight Days,” The New Yorker, September 21, 2009.  It’s not often that a real life event that I’m reading about, an event that I’ve lived through, scares the living daylights out of me.  But this article, which details the week in September of 2008 during which Bernanke, Paulson & Geithner among others worked to prevent a global financial collapse, scared the bejesus out of me.

I knew at the time that a lot was happening behind the scenes.  I also knew that almost everyone who was reporting this story knew nothing about a) history or b) finances, so much of what they said was utterly clueless, based on the tidbits coming out of Treasury.  But I knew things were bad.  We all knew things were bad.  I just didn’t know how bad.

The article goes through that time detail by detail, fact by fact, in a magazine known for its factcheckers.  (Unlike so many others these days.) And I read with horror—and a great appreciation for the attempt at saving things.  Time will tell if they were truly successful, but it seems like they were.

The other thing that struck me as I read this—and has been striking me over and over in the past year—is an assumption of mine that’s finally been debunked.  For some reason, I expected that “adults,” meaning the people in charge, knew something I didn’t know.  That assumption made sense when I was 16.  In fact, it was true then.  But it started to get shaken when Bill Clinton was elected, got rocked when George W. Bush was president, and got shattered when Barack Obama—who is two years younger than I am—got elected.  I know what I don’t know now.  I know he doesn’t know it either.  And neither does Sonya Sotomayor, who just joined the Supreme Court.  In her photos from high school and college, she has the same hairdo I had at that time.  Because we’re the same age.   I have finally, finally realized that we’re all guessing and doing our best.  This article simply reinforces that.  (And a part of me wants my old assumption back.  Now.)