The kind folks at Smart Pop occasionally ask me to write an essay for their nonfiction series, mostly on favorite TV shows.  I do, too, and announce those essays here. But what I don’t say is that then I get the contributor’s copy and read it cover to cover.  So this week, the kind folks at Smart Pop asked me to write a guest blog about my favorite essays.  I did, and you can find it–and the essays–on their website:

http://www.smartpopbooks.com/2153

Enjoy!

I have two marvelous covers to share with you.  First, the cover for my upcoming Kristine Grayson title, Wickedly Charming, which Sourcebooks will publish next spring.  I’m starting up an official Kristine Grayson website this month, so there will be more information on the book on that site by the fifteenth or so.  Suffice to say, Wickedly Charming is about another Prince Charming (not Sleeping Beauty’s Charming [that's Utterly Charming to be reissued after Wickedly Charming], but Cinderella’s Charming, now divorced) who falls in love with one of the evil stepmother’s (Snow White’s. And she’s not evil, just misunderstood).  Confused yet?  You won’t be.  It’s all in good fun.

Here’s the stunning cover:

As soon as I have an exact publication date, I’ll let you know. But it’ll be Spring 2011, so mark your calendars.

The other cover I have to share with you is for a reissue of my very first published novel.  Not the first novel I ever wrote, which my sister finally gave back to me (I was 12 when I wrote it). That novel will never see print, particularly since it’s fanfic.  And badly written. And somewhat juvenile.

This novel, my first to ever be published, I’m still quite proud of.  It’s called The White Mists of Power, and it’s been out of print in the United States for nearly twenty years.  (It’s still in print in at least two other countries, though.)

Here’s the very striking cover:

The book will appear electronically this month.  I’ll let you know when it goes up on the first few sites.  It’ll be on the others by the middle of September.  (It takes a while.)  The print edition will appear this fall from WMG Publishing.  Again, watch this space, and I’ll let you know exact dates.

Still, I had the covers, and I had to share them.

June was the longest short month in existence. Each day felt like it was two days long.  I have no idea why.

We traveled in June.  Dean taught. I did a lot of work. And I read.  And read. And read.  So it was a good month.

In fact, it was a spectacular month, considering how much of what I read I enjoyed.  This is a long list and I got a bit picky.  If I had a few reservations about a book, I didn’t recommend it.  An abundance of riches for once.

So far, however, July is starting slow…

Anyway, enjoy!

June, 2010

Balogh, Mary, A Secret Affair, Delacorte, 2010.  This is the book I was waiting for in the Huxtable series.  It featured the most interesting of the Huxtables, Con, who couldn’t inherit because he was born two days early.  He was a mysterious character in the previous books about the various Huxtables, and always the most fascinating whenever he was on stage.  The novel itself didn’t disappoint, although I worried it might at the beginning.  By the time we got to the middle, I was unable to put it down, and 75 pages from the end, I was in tears.  An excellent novel.  Now I want another.

Bowden, Mark, “The Professor of War,” Vanity Fair, May, 2010.  I’m always two months behind in my magazine reading, so as I read this profile of General David Petraeus, he was testifying before Congress (and fainted—which was a surprise).  The testimony made the article more interesting.

No matter how you feel about the various wars we’re fighting, you might want to look at this profile of the man running them.  He’s impressive (as you might imagine) and has a vision for what he’s doing, based on a view of history that is quite different from the view held by the so-called Greatest Generation.  That view alone made the profile worth my time.  I got a better understanding of the man and what he’s trying to do.  And the article itself challenged a few of my assumptions, something I adore.  I like being forced to revisit my own opinions.

Read this, if only to understand a person with a lot of influence in the world at the moment.

Brinkley, Alan, “The Time of The Lives,” Vanity Fair, May, 2010.  An utterly fascinating article about the start of Time Magazine back in the 1920s.  This is an excerpt from the book, which I’m going to have to order now.  You’ll see why below.  I love the history of publishing, and this is another wonderful example.  I didn’t realize the influence Time had on the language, let alone on publishing.  Take a peek, and see if you want the book like I do.

Chabon, Michael, “Imaginary Homelands,” Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  “Imaginary Homelands” is about writing, reader reaction, and the reactions of experts.  It’s also about the genesis of Chabon’s award-winning, bestselling novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  If you like essays about a writer’s process, this essay is for you.

Chabon, Michael, Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  After reading last month’s Recommended Reading List, you knew the Chabon book of essays had to be on my list.  For the individual essays that I liked, see last month’s list, as well as the others that I liked in June.  This slight collection is well written and fascinating.

Chabon, Michael, “Secret Skin,” Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  A version of “Secret Skin” first appeared in The New Yorker.  I liked the essay when I read it then and I like the slightly revised version now.  The trade paper edition of this book includes the essay as an extra, and it’s a worthy extra.  The essay is about important things like Superman’s cape and superheroes and how necessary they are.  Pick up the book for this essay alone—but make sure you get the right edition.

Child, Lee, 61 Hours, Delacorte, 2010.  I devoured this book in an instant.  Okay—a night or two—but still.  It’s a Jack Reacher novel, set in the dead of winter in the Dakotas.  I felt the cold, and the hopelessness, and the sheer emptiness of the space.  I got angry at Child for doing something he needed to do, and I admired his skill at ending the book properly (something some other authors, trying the same thing, weren’t able to do this year).

I don’t dare say any more without ruining the book for you.  Suffice to say this is a spectacular Jack Reacher novel, and one you should buy immediately.

Dubé, Marcelle, On Her Trail, Carina Press, June 2010.  When I’ve said in previous months that I’ve read some wonderful unpublished fiction, and editors should get off their butts and buy it, I am often talking about Marcelle Dubé.  I’ve been lucky enough to read Marcelle’s work for years now.  Most of you haven’t had the opportunity.  Now you do.

Carina Press has just published her first novel. For those of you who don’t know about Carina, it’s an e-book only line started by Harlequin.  They’re taking some risks in this line, and one of the risks they’re taking is to buy exceptional books that aren’t easily marketed.

Marcelle’s novel, On Her Trail, is one of those.  I would call the story romantic suspense, but it also has ghosts.  It’s almost a gothic, but not quite.  What it is, however, is wonderful.  It takes place in Canada, and has the richness of place I’ve come to expect from Marcelle’s work, as well as excellent characters.  I couldn’t put the book (or the Kindle, actually) down.

You don’t need an e-reader to buy this book. Go to the Carina Press site and download a copy you can read on your computer.  Carina keeps its prices low, so you can check out a number of writers you’ve never heard of for very little money.  Marcelle’s book is selling for less than $4.  I finished the  novel in less than a day.  Now I can’t wait to read the next.

Garrett, Randall, “A Case of Identity,” Lord Darcy, compiled and edited by Eric Flint, Baen Books, 2004.  I’m rereading alternate history for an article I’m writing for a textbook.  I have adored Garrett’s Lord Darcy series since I first encountered the stories in 1983.  Eric Flint compiled all of them in this volume, doing us a great service.

For those of you who don’t know, Lord Darcy lives in a 20^th century alternate history world in which Richard the Lionhearted did not die in 1199 and founded the mightiest empire in history.  That empire uses magic the way we use science.  The Darcy stories are mysteries.  Darcy is a not-so-standard detective, using observation and magical deduction, to solve murders.

I thought I’d read all of the stories, but I hadn’t.  I’m going through them slowly as rewards for other work I have to do.  I read “A Case of Identity” first, back in 1983, and I loved it then.  I like it even more now.  It’s a great starting point for new Lord Darcy readers.  Enjoy.

Granger, David, “Don’t Kill A Tough Guy,” Esquire, May 2010.  David Granger clearly read Lee Child’s 61 Hours (see above) in galleys, so he didn’t see the offensive ad at the end of the book.  Because of that, he has written a thought-provoking analysis of the Jack Reacher books.  I don’t necessarily agree with Granger’s conclusions, but he sure made me think.

Hessler, Peter, “Go West,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  Peter Hessler and his wife Leslie Chang, both Americans, spent most of their adult lives living out of the country.  Both writers, they finally decided to come home after years in China.  They moved to Colorado.

Those are the broad outlines of this essay, but the actual essay itself is so much more than that.  It’s about culture clash—written from the point of view of an insider-outsider.  The differences in life here and life in China are profound, and Hessler perfectly conveys both worlds.

If I were editing this year’s Best American Essays, I’d make sure to include this one.

Jack, Ian, “Five Boys: The Story of a Picture,” Intelligent Life, Spring, 2010.  Intelligent Life is a British magazine that I wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for an interview with The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown on NPR.  I then searched for the website, More Intelligent Life. Talk about a multi-media roundabout way of finding an article.

Fortunately, the search was worth it.  The article is about five boys in a classic British photograph, still used as an example of the class divide.  Jack explores the  history of the photograph, and then goes into the lives of the boys to see if the assumptions about the photo are accurate.  The photo is seventy years old, and most of the boys are now dead, their lives closed books.  A fascinating example of expectations and the misunderstandings that can come for a moment in time—or from appearances.  Take your pick. But look up the article.

Junod, Tom, “Hillary. Happy.” Esquire, May, 2010. I try not to write about politics on my blog, but when the topic is Hillary Clinton, it’s tough not to mention them.  So here you go:  I’ve admired Hillary since she came on the national stage.  The admiration comes not from her politics, but from her life.  This woman has raised a child, maintained a difficult marriage, and pursued her own career.  She survives setbacks better than anyone I’ve seen on the national stage.   She’s an amazing woman, no matter what her politics.

And this article explores all of that.  It also looks at Hillary now, the Secretary of State, the former Senator, and the woman still married to Bill Clinton.  Read this whether you like Hillary or not.  I can guarantee it will expand your view of this remarkable woman.

Larsson, Steig, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Knopf, 2010.  The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is the third in Steig Larsson’s “Girl” trilogy.  If you haven’t read the first two, hike to a bookstore and pick up the first, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, immediately.

I read this 563 page novel in three days.  It would have taken less time, but I didn’t have a full day to devote to the  novel itself. Still, I read it almost as soon as I got it.  And I was up late every single night devouring this book.  I probably would have stayed up all night the second night, except that Dean pulled the book from my  hands and demanded that I get some sleep.  (He was probably right, but jeez.)

Very different from the other two books and yet quite similar.  I read breathlessly, hoping for the best, fearing for the worst.  In addition to the rip-roaring plot and terrific characterization, the novel also had some fascinating insights into Sweden’s legal and governmental systems.  A lot of things that happen there couldn’t happen here because our system is more formal.

I loved all three books and recommend them highly.

Lepore, Jill, “Untimely,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  Because the mainstream media believes that only five books are published every month, they tend to discuss the same work.  (Genres are beneath them, and so are “pop” histories, among other things.)  So I found myself reading about Alan Brinkley’s book The Publisher in two different publications in two days.  I’d already decided to order the book based on the Vanity Fair excerpt (see above).  Then I got to the “review” of it, in The New Yorker, which was more a navel-gazing example of the relationship between The New Yorker and Time.

For all the self-absorption, the article’s focus on the relationship between New Yorker founder Harold Ross and Time founder Henry Luce is fascinating.  I doubt the book focuses as much on that relationship as The New Yorker (apparently it’s still fighting eighty-year-old battles), so that makes the article even more interesting.  Real people are behind these iconic publications—real people who are as petty and visionary as the real people who toil in the genres the magazines ignore.  If you’re an sf fan, you’ll recognize Ross as a type we’ve seen in sf nonfiction publishing.  Worth reading.

Lewis, Michael, “The Mansion: A Subprime Parable,” The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver, Mariner 2009.  Michael Lewis, who lives in California, moved his family to New Orleans while he wrote his “latest project.”  He rented the largest mansion in New Orlean’s tony Garden District.  This essay discusses the problems he did not foresee with the rental—like the maintenance costs and the effects the mansion had on his children’s sense of self.  He uses this to explore the housing insanity that gripped America in the first decade of the 21st century, all the while recognizing that he really didn’t need such a huge home for such a short period of time.  Excellent analysis of what keeping up with those evil Joneses feels like, and an excellent self-examination as well.

Moore, Ward, “Bring the Jubilee,” The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, Del Rey Books, 2001. As I mentioned above, I’m writing an article on alternate history for an sf textbook, and I’m using it as an excuse to catch up on all the alternate history I’ve missed.  I’m having a blast.

“Bring the Jubilee” is one of those classics of the form that I’d heard about over the years, but never had a chance to read.  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1952, the novella holds up beautifully.  In fact, it holds up so well that if I were still editing F&SF and Ward Moore were alive and he submitted the story, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.  It is, in my mind, the perfect F&SF story.

But that’s neither here nor there.  What is important is how it works as a piece of fiction.  Set in a world where the Union lost the Battle of Gettysburg, the story occurs in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—as well as other times.  It believably incorporates time travel as well.  Moore’s history is impeccable, not just his speculations about the Civil War, but his extrapolation.  I can’t praise this story enough.  Find a copy.  You’ll be so happy you did.

Resnick, Mike, “The Incarceration of Captain Nebula,” Asimov’s, October/November 2010.  At least once a year, Mike Resnick taunts me.  He sends me a story that he has finished and informs me that if I were still editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would send that story to me.  As an editor, I have never rejected a Mike Resnick story, and so far, I haven’t seen one that I would reject.  Some are good, but many are just plain brilliant.

This one falls in the brilliant category.  In fact, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get nominated for a Hugo.  The story is short.  It’s space opera—or is it?—and it’s just plain marvelous.  If I say any more, I’ll spoil it for you.

I got to see it before the issue comes out.  The issue should be on the stands as you read this list, so go pick it up.

Sullivan, Brendan, “The Grandmother of Pop,” Esquire, May, 2010. Sullivan knew Lady Gaga when she was Stefani Germanotta, a go-go dancer and song writer who worked in the bar where he was the DJ.  This essay isn’t so much a shocker about Lady Gaga as it is a study of the way lives change when one member of a friendship becomes famous.  Anyone who works in the arts should think about some of the issues he raises here.

Wilkinson, Alec, “The Ice Balloon,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  I plowed through this article as if it were a novel.  The article is more of an essay about S.A. Andrée’s failed hot air balloon journey over the North Pole.  The picture accompanying the article caught my eye: taken by one of the team, it shows the balloon crashed on an ice field.

The article begins with the 1930 discovery of a body on White Island.  The body held a diary of the expedition, all the way to its tragic end.  At this point, no one had known what became of Andrée’s 1897 expedition, and suddenly they had a record of it.

What a record. Dramatic, sad, and courageous.  Fascinating stuff—and yes, there were movies made of it and books written about it.  But now the assumptions in those publications are being challenged, and that is fascinating as well.

The essay was well-paced and compelling.  If you like stories of exploration on far-flung places, this will appeal to you.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Freelancing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Several years ago, my career hit a serious downtown, the kind most careers never recover from.  I made a series of bad business decisions, including hiring two terrible employees who did everything they could to gut my business.  I compounded the initial mistakes by making more mistakes.  On top of that, my health collapsed.  I was ill twenty days out of every month, incapacitated for at least ten of those days.  In the middle of all of that, I hit my mid-life crisis.  Don’t let anyone tell you a mid-life crisis only hits men.  It hits women too.

During those dark days, I kept threatening to give up the writing.  Now, you have to understand what this means.  Giving up writing—for me—is like giving up breathing.  I sometimes say that I, the daughter of two alcoholics, am an addict too, only I’m addicted to writing.  If I don’t write, I go through withdrawals.  This, by the way, is not a joke.  If I am in a particularly bad mood, my husband will tell me to go write something.  If I take his advice (and I don’t always), I feel much better.

So for me to say that I was going to give up writing—and more importantly, to mean it—meant that something was seriously, seriously wrong.  I felt like I was at the bottom of a very deep pit, and I couldn’t figure out a way to climb out, so I simply decided to give up.

Or I would have, if I had an answer to the very reasonable question my brilliant husband would ask me whenever I brought up quitting.

What else would you do?

I had a list that I worked my way down.  At this time, our local radio station needed a news director.  I was overqualified for the position, so before I applied, I investigated.

The job paid one-third of what I earned during those bad years if and only if you added in the costs of the benefit package—a measly health insurance policy not as good as the one I had as a freelancer, and two weeks paid vacation.  To earn one-third of what I was doing, I would have to commit 40 hours per week (and occasional weekends, if there was a news story) to the radio station.  I would have set hours.

I would work for someone else.

In fact, every job on my list—from waiting tables (yes, waiting tables looked good to me then) to going back to editing—required me to work for someone else.  On their schedule.  With no hope for an increase in pay, except at the once a year or once every two year performance review, and then the increase would be rather small (by my freelancing standards).

The only job I came up with that even marginally approached my freelance lifestyle (but not my freelance income) was teaching at a university.  In order to do that, I would have to go back to school, get a masters degree, and get a Ph.D.  Not so bad. Sometimes I miss living in a college town.

But to get my degree(s) would cost money. I would have had to uproot my husband (and my cats), move to a part of the country with infinitely worse weather than the Oregon Coast, and – oh, yeah—be on someone else’s schedule.

Worse than that, when I graduated, tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars later, I’d be at the bottom of someone else’s totem pole, at the bottom of the pay bracket which was at that point (again) one-third of what I was earning in the bad years, and oh, yeah, I’d be working for someone else.  Deeper in debt, no promise of job security (not as a first-year professor), and no real way to earn my way out of it all quickly.

I could have opened another small business (which required a capital outlay—and oh, yeah—it would have to be something else I loved. Since I’ve only had one job I loved for longer than one year (writing), I doubted the new business route worked for me).  My husband even offered me the option  of loafing for two or three years while he supported me.  (Bless him.)  I know that was a serious offer, but I also know he understands me very well.  He knows that after two days of vacation or two days of “doing what I want”—basically two days  of not writing—I’m absolutely miserable.  He made the offer, but he knew the chances of me actually succeeding at lying on the couch, eating bon-bons and reading all day were between slim and none.  I get cranky when I have a week’s worth of research reading and no time to write.  Imagine how I’d feel if I had years to do that.

Okay, some of this is my personal pathology.  I’m really not wired to do anything else.  But beneath that was an honest, desperate search for solutions by a woman who had hit bottom.  I really saw no way to revive my career.  I had given up.  But I didn’t want to do anything else—or nothing else.

I didn’t have blinding revelation.  I didn’t have a life-changing insight.  I realized slowly and over time that I was doing what I loved, that things had gotten bleak, and I had to rebuild.  I found a doctor who helped me live with the health problems, taking my bad days down from 20 per month to seven or so, and taking my worst days down to a maximum of four per month.  (This sounds so easy.  It took two years of experimentation and work.)

I fired the last bad employee, dug in and figured out what damage he had done, and started to repair it.  Then I slowly rebuilt my career, examining every single part of it, figuring out what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t, and figuring out where I wanted to go in the future, and designing a path to get there.

Slowly—and I do mean slowly—I climbed out of that horrible deep dark pit.  What kept me on that climb was not the goal, or even the ability to work hard.  It was a daily reminder—sometimes by listening to the new news director on the local radio station, sometimes by watching the waiters at the local restaurant, sometimes by simply reviewing the options of other jobs (or plain old slacking) and realizing (again) how unsuited I am to all of those.

Unsuited really isn’t the right word.  If I had to, I could have done any one of those things.  The real key was, deep down, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to give up my freelance lifestyle.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again freelancer for thirty years.  Every time I got a real job, I came screaming back to the freelance life. The longest fulltime job I ever held lasted three months.  Even the news directorship, which I had for years, was intermittent.  I was always acting news director, stepping aside when a new, permanent news director came on board.  (Of course, they lasted only a few months, so I’d get the position again.)

What do I like about freelancing?  Just about everything.  The pros, the cons, the ups, the downs, everything that I’ve mentioned in this guide, I’ve not only experienced, but I prefer to working a day job.  I’ve tried very hard in this guide to keep a measured tone about day jobs because I intellectually understand their necessity.  I know why people have them, why people believe that a day job gives them security, and why they would want such a thing.  And if I had had children in my twenties, I would have followed a different life path. I would have gotten a day job, and hated every minute of it, and done it for the security, for my dependents.

But I have no dependents.  Dean is a co-equal partner with me in our various businesses (yes, we have more than two), and he likes the risks as much as I do.  As I’ve said before, we really don’t see them as risks.  We don’t take risks.  We make educated choices based on all of the knowledge available to us.  That we chose to do so without the “safety” and “security” of a large corporation behind us shows our questioning natures from an early age, not any great wisdom or stupidity.  As I said in the day job sections of this guide, I have never believed, even when I was in my teens, that any job was secure.  I’d seen too many people lose theirs, too many people fired for no apparent reason.

And when I was seven, I watched my dad lose his tenured college position in part because he had the courage to speak his mind. (A long story, one someone [not me] wrote a book about, but suffice to say that you can’t have tenure at a college that ceases to exist, and you can’t easily get a job at another college when you’re known as a whistleblower.)

These things—tragedies, really—helped me become a freelancer. I didn’t have to jump over as many mental hurdles as some of my freelancing colleagues when they started.

But risk taker or not, traditionally security minded or not, all freelancers face the same problems and have the same benefits.  I’m sure every single freelancer you talk to will have a different list of benefits for doing the work, but here are mine:

1. I work for myself. I set my hours.  I decide what I’m going to do every day.  Through the work I chose to do, I set my income levels.  Sometimes I turn down boring high-paying projects.  Sometimes I take a high-paying crappy project because I need the money.  I make the decision.  I don’t get assigned that project by someone else.

2. I do what I love. Yeah, yeah.  If you read the entire Guide, you know there are parts of freelancing that I loathe. But I do those things—well, not exactly happily, but not unhappily either.  Because I’m doing them in service of the work I love.  Without those things, I could not do what I do.  They make the rest of what I do worthwhile.

3. I never complain about going to the office. I’m happy to go to work, even if I’m not enjoying the process.  I found it fascinating that when I first opened the Guide to questions, the first questions I got were about taking time off.  I had to ask other professionals how they take vacations because I don’t take one.

Many freelancers don’t.  Why?

Simple.  The work we do now was the thing we did for fun in our free time.  Why take time off from something you love?  (Yes, yes, I know. Rest and all that.  I do rest.  But I don’t see why I need a vacation from something I would do on vacation if I had a day job.  That makes no sense to me at all.)

The idea of time off—and time off as part of a job description—comes from having jobs that you don’t like, jobs you only do for the money. And if that’s the only reason you’re freelancing, friend, then go out and get a day job.  Freelancing’s too hard to do if you don’t love the work.

4. I get to design my own workspace.  I almost wrote that I get to work at home, but I’ve had businesses where I didn’t work at home. Even then, I designed a Kris-style work environment, one suited just to me.

5. I am a creator.  I can’t tell you how important that is.  The economy survives based on how many creators it has.  Those of us who develop our own product and our own businesses don’t just create that product. We also create jobs. In addition to the people I hire, like the house cleaner and gardener I mentioned in the employees section of the guide, there are also the people I keep employed, people whose businesses I frequent with the money I bring into my local community.  From the grocery store to restaurants, from the local bookstore to the clothing stores, the money I spend here doesn’t come from here.  It comes from all over the world, and it helps to fuel the economy in my small town.

6. I am responsible for my own career.  In other words, if I succeed, I succeed because of what I do.  If I fail, I fail because of what I do.  I mentioned the two bad employees in my first paragraph above, and if you read only that paragraph, you might think I blame them for the downturn in my business.  I could, I suppose.  A lot of people would.

But I’m the one who hired them, I’m the one who trusted them to do their jobs with minimal oversight, and I’m the one who didn’t fire them soon enough.  In other words, they caused a lot of damage that would never have happened if I had acted promptly.  Their mistakes are my fault.

7. I control my finances.  I might never make as much money as some writers.  I might not make as much as I would have made working for that friend who offered me a job in Hollywood all those years ago.  But I am not in this for the money, although money is a factor.  I can earn more if I work harder.  I have put myself in the position, as a lawyer friend once told me, to hit not one, not two, but multiple home runs financially.  I might never do so.  But I have the chance, a chance I wouldn’t have had if I had taken a day job.

That chance means less than you think it would, especially if you’re still putting in your 40 hours for a paycheck.  Because you are working for the money, so you’d expect me to as well. But I’m not.  I’m working for the enjoyment.  And study after study after study shows that people who work for themselves are happier than people who work for someone else.

Other studies show that people who are happier live longer than those who are unhappy.  I’d much rather be like Frederik Pohl who, in his nineties, is writing a blog and publishing a book a  year than I would be like a friend of mine who has retired in his sixties, doesn’t know what to do with his days, and is now worried (because of the changes in the economy) that his pension will run out.

Retirement falls into that vacation mindset to me. I retired from editing at the age of 37, and I was happy to do so. Relieved, actually.  I never ever want to do that again.

But retire from writing? Who are you kidding? When I die, I want to die like Jack Williamson did.  He was in his mid-nineties and had just finished a novel.  Or like Robert B. Parker, who died at his desk, while working on the current book.

8. A continual intellectual challenge.  I’m always learning something and doing something new.  Not just related to writing, but also related to business.  I follow court cases that apply to my field, financial regulations that deal with publishing, the changes in publishing methods now happening all over the world.  I constantly work to improve my craft.  I’m always reading something weird and interesting connected to my job (see my Recommended Reading List).  I travel to places I would never have seen otherwise, from places as beautiful as Paris to places as unexpectedly interesting as Salt Lake City.  Each trip is an adventure and each adventure comes from my work.  But I still work.  The last time I was in Paris, I slept very little, not just because of the book tour interviews and signings, but because I stayed up late every night, writing down what I did, and making notes for future stories, doing research, and learning as much as I could about a new city and a new country.  I think these things are fun and challenging.  And lucky me, they’re part of my job.

9. The harder I work, the luckier I am.  That’s the real secret to freelancing.  We seem to have lost the value of hard work.  People want to take things easy, and if you’re one of them, don’t freelance.  But if you like to be busy, then freelance.  You’ll always have too much to do.

But the real secret to freelancing?

Enjoyment.  It’s all about the fun.  When I teach writers, I give them a writing assignment and then tell them to go play. They often look at me like I’m nuts.  But seriously, that’s what I do.  I’m playing every day.  I make things up for a living.  I do something I would do even if no one ever paid me for it.

I’m having fun.

Life is hard enough without slogging through your daily existence.  We all get sick. We all lose family and friends. We all have setbacks and failures and unexpected (nasty) surprises.  Why add on the burden of a hated job if you can at all avoid it?  The biggest benefit to freelancing—for me, anyway—is the fact that it makes life enjoyable.

I even recognized that in the depths of my despair a few years ago.  The worst day at my freelance job is better than the best day at any day job I’ve ever had.

That’s what has kept me freelancing for thirty years.

And, if I’m lucky, will keep me freelancing for at least thirty more.

And there it is. The last installment of the Freelancer’s Guide.  <Whew>  140,000 words of material.  I’ll be spending the next three weeks trimming it down, getting rid of the repetition, and making it presentable.  Then I’ll send out e-copies to everyone who has donated.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll do a short post on the experiment that is the Guide: Did it work the way I expected? Do I consider it a success? I’ll crunch a few numbers, figure out the tangible and intangible benefits, and let those of you who’ve come along for the ride know how it all went.

Thanks ever so much for being a part of this. As I said, it’s been fun.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “The Benefits of Freelancing” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Because I was teaching last week and madly finishing up a novel (which I’m still working on), I got behind in posting the new electronic stories. WMG Publishing is reprinting my entire backlist of short stories in electronic editions, and WMG’s imprint, Five Story Publishing, is publishing groups of those stories by theme in collections. The collections are economical, cheaper than buying the stories individually. The blurb about the collection lists story titles, so you can make sure you’re not getting the same story twice.

I’m only going to post the most recent collections here. I haven’t yet notified you of about ten short stories, so poke around your favorite e-book site. You’ll find other things by me. Also, remember that Smashwords has e-books in all formats. I’ll also list Kindle here. It takes about six weeks for the books to hit Barnes & Noble, and the iBook store, so you can either use the Smashwords file or check back. The books will hit those sites eventually.

First the largest Five Story collection–Five Short Novels:

Five novellas, or short novels, for about 120,000 words of fiction, which is much larger than most fantasy novels. In this collection, you’ll find “Coolhunting,” “Broken Windchimes,” “Dragon’s Tooth,” “The Recovery Man’s Bargain,” and “The Spires of Denon.”  Three are from ongoing series–Abracadabra Inc. (“Dragon’s Tooth”), The Retrieval Artist (“The Recovery Man’s Bargain”), and the Diving universe (“The Spires of Denon.”)  The other two are stand-alone award winners.  You can also get all five as single books.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords.

What these five stories have in common is this: They’re set in Oregon and I wrote them.  Otherwise, they’re a group of very diverse tales.  Two are nominally sf (“The One That Got Away” and “Going Native”), two are mystery (“Patriotic Gestures” and “The Moorhead House”) and one is…well…just a Kris story (and one of my favorites): “The Amazing Quizmo.”  There will be other five-story collections with matching settings. This just happens to be the first, and set in my home state.  Go figure.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords