The March Asimov’s features a story of mine that’s been in the works for about 8 years. I couldn’t write it until I found a few great books on the history of the Tower of London.  Believe it or not, it took a while to find those books.  Even the information online wasn’t as detailed as I wanted.  Eventually I found all that I needed, however, and wrote “The Tower.”  You can find an excerpt here–and if you want, you can order the issue, as either a print copy or a download.  Enjoy!

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.

Ed Gorman bought my story, “Patriotic Gestures,” for his best of the year volume.  It’s out now from Tyrus Books. And I’ve read the entire volume and will be recommending it in the Recommended Reading column. Good stuff in here, including some of the Edgar nominees and winners.  I’m sure your local bookstore has a copy or go here to order.

Also, my Baen’s Universe column subtitled, “An Amazing Amount of Stuff,” talks about why I don’t participate much in the best of year voting.  I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of things to read!  You can read the whole column for free here.

But I’d buy the whole issue, for only six bucks.  It’s got lots of fun stuff.

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.)

Let me say, guys, I couldn’t have done this without you.  You supported Diving, reviewed it, voted for it in the Reader’s Choice awards before it was published, and bought copies quickly when it came out. Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I hope you’ll like the next one.  I’m antsy to finish it–and all the related novellas that will come with it.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Professional Courtesy

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Last week’s post on “Surviving Someone Else’s Jealousy” went viral.  I got more e-mail than I’ve ever gotten on a single Freelancer’s Guide post, and more people tweeted, blogged, or commented on various social networking sites than ever had before.

I had no idea how many of you had suffered from someone else’s toxic emotions in the pursuit of your dreams.  I suggest you look at the comments on last week’s and on Professional Jealousy from the week before.  Lots of good stuff there.

Mixed among the e-mails were several sympathetic e-mails—virtual hugs—for which I thank you very much.  But honestly, folks, I’m okay.  The examples I wrote about, while disturbing to remember, are long in the past.  Yes, occasionally, I have more trouble with toxic personalities, but as I learned last week, we all have that kind of problem if we’re doing something that we love. Which is just sad—not for us, because we’re living fully—but for those jealous rage-filled people out there, who don’t understand that they need to take care of themselves first.

Posts like last week’s make me nervous when I write them because they talk about the negative sides of the business.  More than one e-mail writer confessed that they had no idea how difficult things could get with friends, family, and even strangers.  A few of those e-mail writers wondered if the price of freelancing—of succeeding at what you love—is worth it.

Absolutely.  I don’t want to do anything else.  In fact, I can’t imagine doing anything else.  I’m saving a post for the very end of this Guide on the benefits of freelancing.  (If folks have benefits they want me to mention, send me an e-mail marked “Benefits of Freelancing,” along with the benefit and permission to use your name in the Guide.)  Believe me, there are a lot of benefits.  One of them is the ability to do something like this Guide just because I felt the time was right, not because someone told me to or I had to or because someone thought I was the person for the job.  Nope.  I got the idea and did it when I felt like it, working at all hours of the day, as I could fit it in—sometimes in the early morning (bleh), sometimes late at night, and sometimes pushing up against my own personal deadline.  You guys—and the recession—have gotten me to write a book I’d been thinking about for years, but had never committed to.  And I’m quite happy with the interactivity because without it, I wouldn’t have nearly 120,000 words of Guide so far.

Nor would I have some of the topics I’ve covered.  Like this week’s topic, Professional Courtesy.  I got several letters this week, complaining about the boorish behavior of professionals.  All of the professionals discussed in the e-mails were professional writers, and at first, I thought of starting a new book when this one was done, called Etiquette For Writers.  (Although I’m not sure I should be the Miss Manners of the Literary Set, particularly when I emitted an involuntary “f*ck you!” at a friend this weekend in response to a comment about my age.  [Granted, he is a friend, so he’s used to me.  He said humbly, “Well, you know I mean it,” in the tone someone else would use to say, “Well, you know I didn’t mean it,” and we all laughed and the conversation went on from there.])

As I pondered this Etiquette For Writers idea, I got more and more e-mails about terrible behavior by professionals.  (All writers.)  I had experienced some awful behavior by musicians and actors, so for a while I wondered if the bad behavior belonged only to people who make their living as artists.

Then, on Dean’s (writer Dean Wesley Smith’s) blog, writers started discussing the way that agents—people they hired!—had treated them, and I made a single post about bad behavior involving cell phones among working professionals everywhere.  That’s when I remembered grumping a few years back about sending gifts to friends and never receiving an acknowledgement or a thank-you.  (One friend actually criticized the gift!)  It took a four-year-old whose father had to dial the phone to remind me what courtesy was like; she was so thrilled with her gift that she had to tell me now, and her response pleased me to no end.

Dean teases me about being too polite (despite the occasional involuntary f*ck you), especially when dealing with people I don’t know.  I’m “yessir-ing” and “no-ma’am-ing” and “please” and “thank you” and “would you mind?” and “excuse me” and smiling politely even when I want to rip someone’s head off.  When I’m startled, I revert to polite.

Which is a good response, considering my potty mouth. (I was startled this weekend, but relaxed and among friends, hence the blue outburst.)

We all know we should be polite to others, particularly in a business situation.  But let me share with you some of the bad behavior I’ve heard about this past week as well as some things I’ve experienced.  I’ll start with writers, then move to other professions.  Then we’ll talk a bit about obligations.

1. An unpublished writer bought a published novel written by a friend.  The unpublished writer was excited to buy the friend’s book, complimented her on it, and had her sign it. The friend proceeded to badmouth her own book—talking about the problems she still had with it, the things she should have done, the things her editor should have done, the problems with the sales department, and more.  The writer thinks of that every time she looks at the book, and probably will not buy any more books by the friend because the experience so soured her.

2. I was signing books with New York Times bestselling author.  A fan, clearly excited to meet NYT author, brought in her entire collection of said author’s work.  The author signed the books, but loudly demanded to know why anyone would want her books defaced like that. “What’s the point?” NYT author demanded.  “Proof that you met me so you can show off to your little friends?”  The author continued along those lines—not in a humorous way, but in a very mean way—and the fan left.  In tears.

3.  I got five e-mails—five!—in which the e-mail writers recounted stories like the ones above.  Each e-mail mentioned that the fan had told the published writer how much the fan had liked the work; each time the published writer had criticized the work or the publishing company or the bookstore where the event was being held.  And each e-mail letter complained that the published writer had never once said thank you.  Not once.

4. My favorite bookstore pet peeve: I get to the checkout counter with my half dozen books (try to get me out of a bookstore with fewer than six—I dare you), and the employee behind the cash register—or worse!—the bookstore’s owner tells me that the books I’m buying aren’t any good. Usually the employee/owner hasn’t read the books.  Often the employee/owner sniffs and says something like, “Since you’re buying so many, maybe you’d like a really good book” (in a tone that suggests my choices were substandard).  This, by the way, is different from “Do you like that author? I want to try his books,” which just shows interest.

5. My second bookstore pet peeve, which used to be a general retail pet peeve until the rise of online ordering (especially for music):  Being told in the same snobby tone as the examples above that “we don’t carry that product.”  Now I’m okay with a place not carrying everything, but in bookstores you’ll hear this as “We don’t carry <sniff> romance or <snarf> science fiction.”  I recently encountered this attitude at a pet store, when I went to buy cat food because my usual venue was closed. I was told in no uncertain terms that I do not love my cats because of the food I feed them (recommended by my vet, btw—capitalist dog that he is).  I ran from that pet store, and have not entered it since.  (Since this was the store’s owner who uttered that “you clearly don’t love your cats” line, I also actively discourage friends from going there as well.)

6. I was accompanying a friend as her eyes and ears while she prepared for major surgery.  When she started questioning her surgeon about the procedure, he told her she wasn’t smart enough to understand everything he had to do.  I stopped him, asked a few more clarifying questions, and he got angry at me for questioning him.  We had other problems with this man as the days progressed. I urged her to get a second opinion—and to find another surgeon. She didn’t.  She came out just fine (thank heavens).  But no degree of expertise should allow anyone to treat a patient/client/customer like he treated her.  (And we’ll not discuss the things he said to me while she was being anesthetized.)

I could go on and on and on.  I’d like to say that this is an American problem only—and honestly, our culture has become very, very coarse in the past twenty years.  But I’ve encountered rude behavior from professionals everywhere except (dare I say it?) Canada.  Although come to think of it, the first rude writer I ever met was a famous Canadian literary writer (who has also been on the New York Times list) who spoke to my college creative writing class.  We spent a week preparing for her visit, reading her work, and preparing questions.  Then she arrived, gave a short talk, and proceeded to insult us all by saying that since none of us would ever be published, we weren’t worth her time.  Since we weren’t worth her time, she wasn’t going to take questions.  I haven’t bought her little books now for 30 years because of that rude and condescending afternoon.

So…am I saying be polite at all times?

No.  That would be hypocritical of me.  Generally speaking, I’m not polite.  I’m blunt and foul-mouthed, particularly among people who know me.  I don’t suffer fools very well (and certainly not gladly), and I have been known to take someone apart piece by tiny piece when I get irritated.

But I try to be polite most of the time, partly because I have been on the other side of the bad behavior.  When someone tells me they like a book I’ve written, I thank them.  When they have a question about my work, I try my best to answer it.  When they scream at me in public (see last week’s piece), I do my best not to scream back.

Let’s talk about fans/readers/clients/patients for a moment.

Without them—oh, freelancer—you are nothing.  If you do not have a readership, then you won’t last long as a professional writer.  If you don’t have clients, then you won’t make it as a lawyer.  If you don’t have patients, you’re not a doctor.

Granted, that surgeon I mentioned above never got his patients directly like a family practice doctor does.  If you see that surgeon, you usually see him once or maybe twice, and always at the recommendation of another doctor.  Believe me when I tell you that I reported that surgeon to all the doctors I know who recommended him, and all of them were shocked at his behavior.  I don’t know if I had a negative impact on his recommendation rate, but I like to think I did.

Be as courteous as you can.  I’ve had fans go through my books line by line, telling me what’s wrong with them, and then buy another book and have me sign it. If I had gotten defensive at those critiques (and trust me, I was feeling defensive, I just didn’t express it), the readers wouldn’t have purchased another book.  Do I want fans like that? Of course I do.  I’m a fan like that.  I won’t tell a favorite writer why I think she went wrong in her most recent book, but I will tell another fan and we’ll discuss the problems.  And then I’ll go out and buy the next book.  I’ll wager a lot of you are the same way.

Most of us just wouldn’t tell the writer how much we hated one of her efforts.  And that’s the only difference.

I can be very forgiving of fans, just like I can be forgiving of customers.  I went out of my way as a waitress and as a retail clerk to make sure that the customers were happy, even if the customers were drunk or rude or wrong.  That old adage, the customer is always right, is a good one to remember when you’re in public.

Of course, there are times to toss the adage.  The customer should not be abusive or violent.  Certain types of behavior should not get a pass, ever.

But mostly, what does it hurt you—the professional—to bite your lip? To be polite or just not say anything at all?  Writers, say thank you when someone compliments your work.  Bookstore owners, be thankful someone is buying your stock.  Lawyers and doctors, expect your clients to be a bit emotional for most are seeing you at a tough time in their lives.  A little empathy goes a long way.

Remember, though, that everyone has a bad day, and not everyone has social skills.  I think the reason so many of my examples this week were about writers is not just because I am a writer, but because writers usually don’t need social skills.  We sit in a room and make things up.  We interact with ourselves, our family, our friends, and our imaginary friends.  Sometimes we forget how to survive in the real world.

I think everyone should get a pass for the occasional rude remark.  If the behavior is continual, though, like that surgeon’s, then don’t go to that professional again.

If you’re a person who has poor social skills, figure out how to ameliorate the problem.  There are actual classes to shore up your public behavior, should you want to take them. Community colleges offer them as do regular colleges.  In my small town, our chamber of commerce has a once-a-year course in public relations.  Taking something like that might be worth your time.

If you’re like me—a person who can be polite some of the time, but not all of the time—figure out a way around the problem.  In most instances, I’m just fine.  But when I’m teaching a one- or two-week workshop, with long hours, I know I’ll relax and then my potty mouth will get the best of me.  So I warn my students ahead of time, and I apologize in advance.  Then I try my best to be on my best behavior.

A lot of people can’t be polite when they’re busy.  Politeness is the first thing out the window.  In that instance, I’d recommend hiring a receptionist, a secretary or a clerk—someone to handle the public while you’re handling the actual business.  (See my posts on employees first.) And if you can’t afford the help, then take classes.  Make an effort.  Learn how to put your best foot forward.

Here are a few tips to help you be courteous.

1. Never take your fan/reader/client/customer for granted.  Treat them with respect and maybe just a bit of awe.  After all, they’ve deemed you worthy of their time, trust and/or hard-earned dollars.  Honor that.

2. Say please and thank you.  I know, I sound like your mother.  Well, take those lessons to heart.  In response to a compliment, a simple thank you means a lot more than a critique of the work at hand.  Show some appreciation for the person who came into your store, ordered food off the menu you designed, or bought a book you wrote.  They didn’t have to do that, you know.  You’re not entitled to customers or nice comments.  You have to earn them, like everyone else.

3. Dress up. This goes for anyone who interacts with the public.  It’s better to be overdressed than underdressed.  As I  mentioned in an earlier blog post, I watch American Idol, and I use it as a learning tool.  One thing that continually shocks me is how many people claim that being a professional musician is their lifelong dream, yet these people show up in sloppy sweats, ratty blue jeans, and ill-fitting t-shirts.  One girl this year—who was chosen from the auditions to go to Hollywood Week—was incredibly poor (I mean horribly, awfully poor).  She managed to scrounge up $4 to buy a dress at the Dollar Store—and you could tell that purchase meant she went without food or gas or something else important.  She worked hard to look her best. Yet people with a lot more money looked like they had just gotten out of bed.  Most of these folks weren’t wearing their punk rocker costume. They just hadn’t bothered to clean up for this big opportunity.

If you work at home and don’t normally dress up, your “public” clothes will become a costume.  I have my jeans and ratty sweaters for at home, and my business attire for book signings or conventions, and my black-tie outfits for banquets.  When I wear the business attire or my black-tie outfits, I’m wearing something slightly unusual—and it serves as a reminder that I am out in public.  My costume, if you will, helps me be just a bit more formal than I would usually be.

4. If you have trouble being polite, smile and say very little. The smile is important so that folks don’t think you’re surly.  But put on your company face, and do the best you can.

5. Be respectful.  I think half the writer examples I read this week wouldn’t have occurred if the writer had taken a moment to view the person they were talking to with respect.  Success doesn’t give you a license to be rude.

6. Enlist a Rescuer. This may sound silly, but it’s important, especially if you have fans.  You’ll need someone to grab your arm and pull you out of a crowd.  I’ve done that for some famous writers back when I was editing.  Dean does it for me at my signings, and I do it for him at his.  Sometimes fans don’t know when to stop hogging your time.  A bookstore clerk will often hustle the fan along, but at conventions, no one will do that.  Your rescuer can get you out of a tight situation without insulting the well intentioned person who has backed you into a corner.

The other thing your rescuer can do is stop you from making a fool of yourself.  I have a look that I get when someone has crossed over this mental line that I have that goes from “nice” to “fool.”  (Usually that line gets crossed by some unforgivable [often bigoted] political remark.)  I’ve had half a dozen friends save the poor person who crossed my mental line by recognizing my look and getting me away from the person quickly.

Once I was at a dinner with a famous person whose politics are—shall we say politely—the opposite of mine. We had a business relationship, that I carefully kept out of the political arena for years.  But, as luck would have it, our dinner fell two days after a particularly hard-fought election.  And he launched into some horrible, unbearable diatribe filled with n-words and other such things.  My assistant, who was having dinner with us, grabbed my knee in the middle of that diatribe and while I thought of going for the steak knife and disemboweling this famous person, my assistant held me down and dug his fingers into my thigh until I was black-and-blue.  But I didn’t destroy a lucrative business relationship with my potty mouth and my politics—only because I had a rescuer at that table.  (Or rather the famous person had a rescuer.  Because had we been alone at that dinner, I might be in prison now.)

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my post on surviving other people’s jealousy brought out this dark side of professionalism.  I think most of you who are being rude—and believe me, some of you are reading this blog—don’t realize that you are.  Figure out how to gain some self-awareness in this area.  Maybe even practice the things you’ll say when you go out in public.

It’s important.

Remember this: Professional courtesy brings repeat business. Rudeness will often destroy the relationship.  Granted, there are times when you don’t want to do business with that person ever again.  But usually, you do.  Be nice. Be polite. Be respectful.

Really, it’s not that hard.

Early on, as I did the Guide, I had no idea how to respond to a donation.  I didn’t know that I could simply hit “reply” on the PayPal notification to say thank you.  So I missed some of you.  Let me say thank you here and now.  And let me remind you that you’ll be getting an e-copy of the Guide when I’m done as another way of saying thanks.

I appreciate all the e-mails, comments, and donations.  You guys have made doing this Guide fun.  And I rarely look at nonfiction as fun any more. So thank you all.

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

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Surviving Someone Else’s Jealousy

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About five minutes after I posted last week’s section on professional jealousy, I got back-to-back e-mails from regular readers of the Guide, asking me how to deal with being a victim of professional jealousy.  Both letters had poignant stories of betrayal and utter nastiness on the part of the jealous person, and sadly, both emails were familiar because I’ve been through that, and worse.

I got more e-mails like that throughout the week, as well as some good comments in the comments section.  (Check that out when you look up the link.)  On Twitter, someone asked me if jealousy was wrong, but envy was okay because envy wasn’t as personal. That tinged me a bit, but I wasn’t sure why, so I asked him to explain (he did, kinda, but honestly, it’s hard in 140 characters).

He was wrestling with the idea that sometimes someone else’s success spurs you on.  Sometimes it’s because that other person seems like a regular person to you (not a Writer or a Superstar, but a wannabe made good), and that serves as inspiration.  And I have to admit, I’ve experienced that.  I’ve looked at someone else’s success as inspiration, partly because I believed I was as good at the chosen task or better than that other person.

The difference has always been that the other person tried to succeed in their chosen field, and I hadn’t.  That other person led me to try when I hadn’t had the courage to try before.  I still think envy is the wrong word here—and I’ll expand on that in a moment—but I have a few other points to make first.

A few people wrote on their blogs that envy is necessary.  One person told me that jealousy is hard-wired and we shouldn’t fight it, and I should (basically) stop telling people to avoid it.

He needed to read the post again.  I recognized that we’ll all feel jealous.  We just need to put that jealousy to use—and the use should not be tearing the object of our jealousy down.

But to the handful of people who flatly said in their blogs or in response to other people’s blogs and tweets about my post that jealousy is necessary and that we need to tear down others to build ourselves up, let me say directly: you folks have a serious problem.  You need to solve it or it will eat you alive.  It’s not okay to destroy others in order to succeed.

Oh, you might have some success for a while, but it won’t last. And when it ends, you’ll be stunned at the amount of hatred that comes your way—hatred that you’ve earned by destroying (or trying to destroy) the people around you.

I’m going to talk about being on the receiving end of that nastiness in a moment.  But first, let’s talk about the inspiration thing, because it’s subtle and difficult.

I think all of us have looked at someone who has achieved success and said, “If you can do that, I can do that.”  Which is, I think, a healthy reaction if kept private.  It’s also healthy if you use that person as inspiration.

I do this all the time with exercise.  If you read my recommended reading lists, you know that I read Runner’s World, and in every issue, Runner’s World has inspirational stories of people who’ve overcome great odds to run a marathon or even a 5K.  Some of these people have suffered horrible trauma. Others have prosthetics.  One recent article was about a blind woman who ran races.

I look at the folks overcoming illness like cancer who run every day, and I think, if they can run while having chemo and weakness and tremors and surgery, I can run with a headache or when I’m feeling a little cranky or when it’s raining.  I’m not trying to tear them down.  I’m using them to inspire me.

I think that’s what a lot of you envy folks meant.  I think you’re talking about looking at someone who shouldn’t be successful in their chosen field and yet who is, and examining what it is that person has done that you haven’t done.

That’s not envy.  That’s inspiration. And yes, I agree. It’s a good thing.

It’s sometimes hard to separate out from the negative emotion.  Because that inspiration might have started after a burst of jealousy. Again, see last week’s post about how to turn jealousy around.  The key question is: What is that person doing that I’m not doing? And if your answer is always negative—that person is pandering; that person has no talent, just luck; that person bribed her way into that position—then you’re jealous.  But if you can find what that person has done right, you’ve found the way from jealousy to inspiration.

When I was twenty and still in college, I met a man who wrote part-time for the same organization I wrote for.  He was also a nonfiction freelancer.  He paid for his apartment, his food, his car, and his clothing out of his nonfiction income.  I saw his product at work.  He had a great voice and a lot of talent, but he couldn’t spell his own name and his manuscripts were almost unreadably sloppy.

I figured if he could succeed in the cutthroat nonfiction world with those messy manuscripts, then I could with my clean manuscripts. I wasn’t the wordsmith he was, but I was more professional.

My analysis of his work got me started.  I wrote for some of the same places he did, and began to wonder how he funded his lifestyle.  I wasn’t getting paid enough per article to pay for my apartment and my expenses.  Eventually, I moved to larger and larger publications, publications that paid me a month’s worth of expenses per article. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he had supplemented his income writing term papers for students, and (ahem) dealing cocaine.  (It was 1980, after all.)

I didn’t take the negative view—that you can never make a living at writing; that you need to deal drugs to make any money at all.  Instead, I saw that he was succeeding as a freelancer, getting work published even when he wasn’t trying hard.  And that inspired me even more.

Because I hadn’t been trying at all.

I had misunderstood how he made the bulk of his income, but my misunderstanding had gotten me off my butt and into my first writing career.  And I am very grateful for that.

So yes, use others as inspiration, but don’t envy them. Don’t tear them down, and don’t belittle them or their accomplishments.

It will do neither of you any good.

Every year, Dean and I do a short weekend workshop on becoming a fulltime professional writer.  We do it for very little money, but we do it because we have knowledge that needs to be shared with the folks out there from two successful writers, not burned out and bitter ones.  (This year, we’ll do a two-hour version at Radcon in Washington State in February, and another in September in Oregon.)

One thing we always, always talk about is this: when you achieve your dream, when you start having success in your chosen field, you will lose friends.

What causes the loss? Jealousy, bitterness and anger on the friend’s part.  These people can’t be happy for you and your success.  Instead, they’re upset that they haven’t achieved the same level of success at the same time.

(You could see just this very scenario brewing on American Idol last week; two friends auditioned together and only one made it through. The judges kept admonishing the girl who didn’t make it to support her friend, but it was very clear she wouldn’t and the friendship was in for rocky times—if not complete collapse.  Look at the footage here.)

It’s especially bad for couples.  We advise couples who are in the same field to prepare for this long before it happens. Because you’ll never have the same degree of success.  Someone will always be better off, and that success will go back and forth (provided you’re both working to succeed; if only one person works, then only one person will succeed).  You have to prepare for that or your relationship will end.

You can prepare for the different degrees of success by talking about all aspects of it, including the pie-in-the-sky aspect—the dream of dreams. What happens if one of you achieves that and the other doesn’t?  If you’ve talked about it, you have probably worked out the worst of the problems in advance.

If you think there won’t be any problems or if you think you’ll deal with it if (when) the time comes, you’re in for a heap of trouble.

Once we’ve warned people that this possibility exists, they do go home and talk to their spouses, their family, and their close friends. That should cover the problem areas, right?

Oh, no.  Because you never know where this toxic jealousy will come from.

Let me give you a few personal examples.

1. I interviewed for a prestigious job at the request of the business owner.  He interviewed two other people as well.  One of those people, a man who had been in the field for thirty years at that point, came away from the interview telling all his friends that he had nailed it, and that he would have the job.  The business owner told me (in my interview!)  how badly the other man had blown the interview, telling the business owner how his business sucked and how only the other man could save it.  (Ooops.  Don’t ever do that, folks.)

Anyway, a month later, when the announcement came that I—a relative newcomer—had gotten the job, the other interviewee was shocked. Then mortified. And then he proceeded to do everything he could to trash me and my work for the entire time I held that job.  He actively hatefully and spitefully badmouthed me to everyone in our mutual business.

I was appalled.  I’d only met him once or twice casually and the things he said about me were among the worst things anyone had ever said about me in my life.  I didn’t know what to do, so I consulted some longtime friends, who told me not to do anything.

One of those friends is known for suing people.  I was stunned to get that advice from that person.

But my friend turned out to be right.

Because here’s the thing: In that other interviewee’s thirty-year career, he had done this countless times before.  He had actively destroyed the careers of others—successfully, in his early years—and unsuccessfully later on. Why wasn’t he successful later on?  Because he became known as a spiteful, mean-spirited man who deliberately badmouthed anyone who was more successful than he was.  And as time went on, that became most everyone else.  He stalled his once-promising career with his nasty mouth.

2. When I quit editing the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I had a terrible year in public.  Because I was no longer perceived to be in a position of power, people felt they could tell me exactly what they thought of me to my face with no reprisals.

Mostly, people made snide comments on panels.  But on one particularly memorable afternoon, a woman came up to me after a panel and screamed at me for ten minutes, calling me every single name in the book.  I figured it had something to do with my editing.  Nope. Turns out she believed she was a better writer than I was, and she deserved “fame” more than I did.

Finally one of the convention security people pulled her out of the room.  My other panelists were shaken.  I was surprised that the screaming had nothing to do with my editorship (as it had other times, mostly because I rejected someone’s story), but with my writing.

I had never met this woman before, although I’ve seen her since. (She’s still unpublished, by the way.)  She hates me for my success.  I avoid her…for obvious reasons.

With the rise of the internet, you get to see more and more of this bile.  Once you have name recognition, people will hate you for something they perceive that you’ve done.  Not necessarily something you’ve done at all.  And you will never have met this person (nor will you ever want to).

It’s, sadly, one of the prices you pay for success.  People will have opinions about you. And sometimes, those opinions are rooted in jealousy.

Honestly, all of these things and the hundred or so more examples that I have (I am not exaggerating) are relatively easy to deal with.  They’re expected. If you follow the careers of successful people, you know that they deal with stalkers, the unhinged, and the unbelievably jealous.  You will get that, even on a local level, especially in a small town (a friend of mine is dealing with that at the moment; her business is successful and a former friend of hers is going bankrupt.  He’s attacking her in public because he can’t look at her success without seeing his own failure).

All of that is occasionally frightening, often worrisome, and sometimes laughable (another friend of mine overheard himself being described as the floating turd of literature—no matter how many times he got flushed, he still rose to the surface—and he thought that the funniest thing he’d ever heard.  I’ve heard a few gems like that about myself, although none quite as colorful).  But none of it is as painful as the loss of a friend to jealousy.

The worst case that I can write about publicly without revealing any identities except my own happened in my last year editing F&SF and in the first two years after that.  My writing career was really taking off. Dean and I were both making a great deal of money writing and we were being published everywhere.

I had to quit F&SF because I no longer had time to do the work.  I needed to spend 24/7 on writing.  I had to choose between the two careers—editing and writing—and I chose writing.

I was clear about that with my friends and with the field.  When I gave my notice to the publisher, I told him that argument and an increase in salary wouldn’t help.  I made nearly 10 times more as a writer than I was editing, but I spent 30 hours of my 40 hour weeks editing.  It was no longer cost effective for me to edit, and he couldn’t pay me enough to keep me.

Around that point, six months before my last issue as editor appeared, rumors started about me in New York.  I was unreliable. I was crazy. I was impossible to work with.  At the same time, casual acquaintances called me to ask about my health or some personal problems that I had confided with only a few very close friends.  These acquaintances were concerned for me, and they were kind enough to tell me who had told them of my personal problems.  They also added that they didn’t think that person was my friend, because that person also started the rumors that were spread around New York.

I had worked in the field long enough that I’d worked with a lot of people in the business.  They knew the rumors weren’t true.  But they were worried that I’d be damaged anyway, particularly since the rumors came from my hometown. They were afraid that others would think the “friend” was in the position to know.

I gathered information including e-mails and letters.  Then I talked to my so-called friend, who told me that I had become too big for my britches (seriously! He used that cliché) and I needed to be taken down a peg.  He felt he had to do it for my own good.

Needless to say, that was our last conversation.  Ever.  I was heartbroken.  I had liked and trusted this person, and believed us to be very good friends.  He had spent three years of our ten-year friendship quietly trying to destroy my reputation.

Why? Because when we met, he was more successful than I was.  With several short story sales and one novel sale, he was the expert on publishing.  I surpassed him, selling eight novels in one year while editing, and then I won awards.  He continued to write, but at his slower pace.  And he apparently couldn’t deal with my success.

I needed to be taken down a peg.

He was doing it for my own good.

All he managed to do was destroy a friendship and harm his own career.  People who had worked with me, people to whom he had badmouthed me, told me years later that from that moment forward, they considered him untrustworthy.  They decided they’d do business with him only when he had something so good that it was worth suffering his destructive personality.

To date, most of these people have never ever worked with him—and probably will not.

I’m not the only person he has done this to.  His behavior hasn’t changed over the years.  Recently, he did this to an entire science fiction convention because he didn’t like its chairman.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the behavior of someone who has gone off the rails.  But he continues to function in the real world, making a small living and paying his bills.  But that promise of success he had back in the late 1980s? It’s gone now—primarily because he has put more energy into destroying others for the past twenty years than he has in improving his craft.

So, how do you handle all of this?

Oh, jeez.  If only I had a simple solution for you.

But I’ll give you what I know.

If the jealousy is minor or distant, as in those first two instances I described:

1. Have a sense of humor.  You could get mad at being described as a floating turd, but really, seriously, that’s just wasting energy.  Have a good belly laugh at the stupidity of the commentator whom you don’t know and probably will never meet and move on.

2. Have a good attitude.  It’s about them, not you.  They just happened to choose you that day to be the target of their own self-loathing. As long as you remember that, you’ll be fine.

3. Have someone else read your hate mail.  I stopped having Dean do it when I became editor of F&SF because he got angrier than I did. Then I realized that I would’ve gotten angry if someone had described my husband the way people were describing me.  So I had my assistant open the hate mail.  However—here’s a key point—keep that hate mail.  You might need it if things escalate.

4. Don’t engage.  Don’t answer the hate mail. Don’t write a comment on the stupid person’s blog. Don’t tweet about it.  Don’t give this person the attention he so obviously craves.  And don’t let him know that he’s gotten to you (if, indeed, he has).  Just make a note of his name, add it to your nutball file, and move on.

As a sidebar, the more successful you get the more you’ll need a nutball file and a hate mail file.  Keep the stuff, but don’t focus on it.  I’ve never had to use mine for anything, but a friend who ended up with a stalker used his to show that how the stalker escalated the horrid behavior over time.

And if you don’t think jealous people and stalkers have anything in common, then you’re quite naïve.  Sadly.

5. Move on.  You can’t do anything about these people. They exist, they have troubled lives, they’re probably miserable. Don’t let them make you miserable.  Enjoy your life and invest no energy in them.  None. Take your hands off the keyboard.  Now….

But—

If you’re suffering from attack from someone you know, someone who is jealous of your success, then you might have to take some serious action.

First you need to protect your heart.  Most often—unfortunately—the people who start these attacks are (were) friends.  Or you thought they were friends.

I’ve only had one friend acknowledge jealousy and get help to overcome it.  That friend said some pretty awful things for a while, didn’t like the person she’d become, apologized, and then became a true friend.

But out of the dozens of incidences I’ve gone through since I’ve had some success, I’ve only had one friend remain a friend after all of that bile.  (And hers wasn’t very bad, on the scale of nastiness).

So take my experience as a cautionary tale.  You will lose friends as you become successful.  You might not get them back.  And that’ll be on them, not on you.

Here’s what you do when someone you know actively tries to demolish your success.

1. Discuss the problem with them, sometimes using a mediator.  Not another friend, but a therapist or some kind of helping professional (minister, rabbi, counselor).  Sometimes people don’t realize how toxic they’re being.  They might quit.  Chances are they won’t. But they might. Give your friend the chance to step back from her behavior and apologize.

2. If the friend continues to attack, walk away.  Don’t actively end the friendship.  Just stop calling, stop socializing, and stop interacting.  If the friend then asks why you’ve left, you can tell him about how uncomfortable his behavior has made you.

Most of the time, these people don’t ask.  Your presence inflames their jealousy.  They see you and your success, and it angers them because they haven’t got that success (usually they haven’t worked for it and don’t want to work for it).  So they attack you.  If you’re not there, they’ll find a new target.  And they’ll be more comfortable with you gone.

3. Take legal action.  I’ve had a few people actively try to destroy one of my many careers.  One person was so active in his attempt to destroy me that a high-powered attorney friend begged me to let him file several lawsuits—one for restraint of trade, one for libel, and a couple others that I no longer remember.  Since I didn’t want to pursue that career, I didn’t want to pursue lawsuits either. But had I stayed in that career, I would have had to defend my career and my reputation in court.

Remember that lawsuits take years and can be as or  more toxic than the behavior that starts the suit. Don’t go to the legal option lightly.  It will take over your life—and who wants to spend years on that kind of unpleasantness?

Number 2 is your very best option. Walk away. Don’t engage.

It’s also the hardest option, because you want to fight back.  The worst thing you can do is retaliate.  Suddenly you’re on par with the jealous person and you’re giving them more ammunition.

I have not engaged in dozens of these things, and eventually the jealous person gives up. They move on to new targets or they quietly slink into the background.  Let them.

It’s hard. It’s very hard.  As I wrote this section tonight, I walked away from the computer four separate times.  I had chocolate.  I ordered some books. Then I ordered some music.  I watched news.  I had to force myself to come back.

I’m still furious at some of these people, particularly the ones I can’t mention here because you’ll know who they are.  With the exception of the person I mentioned during my F&SF days, I’ve left out most of the people who’ve tried to hurt me since my writing became well known.

Did they hurt me? Not the people I didn’t know.  I find them amusing.  But my former friends? Oh, yes.  I feel betrayed and sad.  I still want to retaliate.  I want to write a long essay about each and every one of them, by name, telling you how awful they are.

But I won’t.  Probably not ever.

I have learned that dealing with other people’s jealousy is one of the downsides to success.  So I breathe.  I take long walks.  I throw rocks in the garden.  But I never, ever engage.

Because that way lies madness.

So to answer all those questions about what you do?  Be sad. Be angry.  Take care of yourself.  And move on.

That’s all you can do.

After those first two e-mails about dealing with other people’s jealousy, I got a few others as well. I’m sorry that you folks are dealing with this, but I do thank you for the Guide topic.  If so many of you are having this problem, then even more of you need to hear about it.

So if you have other topics I need to cover, please let me know via e-mail.  And as I try to wrap up this incredibly lengthy Guide, remember that I will compile the finished product into an e-book and send it to whomever donated to help me write the Guide.  You guys are great.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Surviving Someone Else’s Jealousy” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.