Briefing for a Descent into Freelance

ONE of the reasons I kind of hate doing “writerly” events is the repetition of small talk effect: You wind up making the same small talk with other writers and non-writers alike. I’ve had a variation on the following conversation roughly one billion times (some of the following may only have occurred in my head):

OTHER: So, are you published?

ME: Don’t you KNOW who I AM? I will smite thee with this old manual typewriter I carry everywhere!

OTHER: Cool, cool. Is writing, like, your full time job?

ME: I’m not wearing any pants. Do I look like a man who has income?

In other words, all these conversations quickly establish that the other person has never heard of me (indicating my book sales) and then requires of me some sort of financial disclosure.

Up until a few years ago I was one of the Day Job Writers, just like 99.9% of all of us. I wrote and was published (pretty well) but I had a day job. Then in 2012 my day job and I had a disagreement and we decided to see other people. The disagreement, I think, had something to do with the fact that I last paid conscious attention to my Day Job in 2009, but at least I wasn’t the guy who got fired from my company because he sat in on a conference call with his webcam accidentally switched on while wearing no shirt. True story.

But I digress.

After breaking up with my day job I hurriedly called my agent to ask whether I had coincidentally gotten rich in the last few hours. Being informed that this did not happen, I knew I needed to replace my day job revenues somehow, or my wife The Duchess was going to ask me to leave the premises. She’s old school, you see, and thinks men should have jobs. No matter how often I’ve explained to her that I am a Modern Beta Male who is 100% okay with being supported by his wife, she just boxes my ears and shoves a classifieds section into my hands.

BUT! I had a bold idea. The only skill I have ever demonstrated in my whole life, the only thing I can actually say I am good at, is writing. In fact, the list of things I am not good at is pretty much infinitely long. The list of things I am good at has, at most, five things, and four of them are curious physical abnormalities I’ve never been able to monetize. So I said, I could write freelance.

The Inner Swine Taught Me Everything I Know

This was easier than you might imagine. Of course, by “write freelance” I don’t mean I was suddenly Sebastian Junger, getting hired to write intricate thought pieces for glossy magazines or even interesting long-reads for the Internet. Freelance writing, for me, meant writing blog posts and short articles for pennies a word. A lot of them, every day.

Not a bad gig, actually, and there’s a lot of work out there. If you can write coherently reasonably quickly, you can make a decent living at it. I put out a zine for 20 years. That meant that for 20 years, I produced about 100,000 words a year on a wide variety of subjects — little did I know I was training myself to be a blog ghostwriter, but I was. I had a knack for it.

So, my new Day Job is freelance writing. And thus, I never leave the house.

Freelance Living

I mean this more or less literally: I have a home office. I wake up in the morning, make some coffee, feed the cats, and then walk back up the stairs and sit down at my desk. I continue to sit there for several hours.

The thing about freelance work they never tell you is that if you get some traction with it, it becomes very similar to a day job in an office. Yes, theoretically you can stand up and go outside any time. You can work any sort of crazy hours, and you can turn down any project. The reality is that you usually can’t turn down much work because a) you have a relationship with your client and b) you just spent $500 on curious whiskies, so you need the cash. So you wind up working pretty steadily all day, and if you take a walk at noon to enjoy a nice day you wind up working at 10PM to hit a deadline.

Thus, I never leave the house.

That’s okay, for the most part. First of all, my local town has enacted a series of ordinances restricting my public appearances for all sorts of specious reasons, so going outside is a complicated process involving demonstrating that I am wearing pants to the officer posted outside my door and passing a breathalyzer test before being allowed to walk unaccompanied. Plus, I get a lot of angry stares from neighbors and many people will take their dogs of the leash and order them to attack me. So going out is always more work than I generally like to put into things.

So, I spend a lot of time inside with the cats.

Smelly Cat, What are They Feeding You?

I’d like to say that you could film me going about my freelance work every day, then set it to some cool jazz music and upload it to Youtube and it would look like a commercial for some upscale lifestyle – Jeff on the deck with a whiskey, tapping out gold and looking serious. Jeff stretched out on the couch, peering wisely at his laptop. Jeff negotiating more pennies per word as he pads around his luxurious home.

The reality’s a bit different: Jeff in a pair of tattered shorts and no shirt, sweating profusely as he sits in his stuffy office, three cats sitting on his desk so there’s no room for his keyboard, meaning he has to balance that keyboard on the cat sleeping in his lap. What’s Jeff writing? 3,000 words on real estate law in Scotland, something he just learned actually exists about fifteen minutes before.

Next scene: Jeff weeping quietly in the bathroom while the cats scratch at the door and caterwaul outside.

Next scene: Jeff contemplates lunch, decides a bottle of wine is a healthy choice, the rest of the day might as well have a “WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES” sign hung on it.

Next scene: Jeff wakes up at 3AM with a note from the Duchess taped to his forehead informing him that she purchased $1,300 worth of shoes that afternoon and so he might want to consider taking on a few more freelance projects.

Next scene: Jeff weeping quietly in the bathroom while the cats scratch at the door and caterwaul outside.