New Year's Resolution (a little late)

I'm finally getting around to this: The one thing I want to say for 2008 is that I want to make $10,000 more from writing than I did in 2007.

Which maybe sounds outrageous, but really, I think it's doable. (Can you keep a secret? I really didn't make that much from writing in 2007.)

Plus, I'm up to $2 a word now! Honestly, when I started doing this I had no idea people got paid that much. Now making a living actually seems feasible.

The Big Article

We're all looking for a big break, right? Well, I just may have gotten one, in the form of an article I sold to the Christian Science Monitor, a paper of international renown and repute. Here it is:

Sound Lands on Google Earth

Not only did it end up in the Monitor, the article was also picked up by USA Today, the ABC News website, and was reported to have been at the top of Google News. It's no exaggeration to say it's been seen by millions of people. I was pretty happy to make $400 on the deal, which is a lot more than I'm used to... but someone said, "Shouldn't you make more, taking into account the circulation?"

I don't know. Hopefully it will translate into something I can make a living off of. Naturally, I'm trying to milk my success for all it's worth, querying like mad, using the credit as a selling point for the innate wonderfulness of my prose. Oh, I've got lots of ideas. Are you an editor? Do you want to hear them? Just ask!

I had an interesting conversation with my housemate Craig today. He's a jazz guitarist, and we discussed the value of writing versus music. I posited that writing is valued more in our culture than music, in that everyone who graduates high school is expected (hopefully) to be able to write a coherent sentence, while only a small percentage can write a line of music. Ironically, that means musicians are valued more when it comes to performing. After all, we all can put a few words together, right? But only the talented among us can make music, or so it seems. So, anyone who knows a few songs can get a $50 gig playing in a bar, whereas a writer may takes years to earn the same. But in all fields, anyone who truly excels can rise to the top and make scads of dough.

Hopefully I've been at this gig long enough. Baby needs a new pair of shoes!

UPDATE: Things are going well - just landed an assignment for the "Unusual Westerners" section of the High Country News.

Climb every mountain... ?

(Photo: The Tetons, with Jackson Lake Lodge in the foreground)



It's that time of year again: the time when I have to figure out what I'm gonna do when the ski season's over.

As many of you know, I returned to Bozeman fully intent on making it as a freelance writer. While I am working and getting paid for that to a certain extent, it hasn't been the flag-waving success I'd been hoping for. So, in January I took up my old job waiting tables at Jimmy B's Bar and Grill at the Bridger Bowl Ski Area.

Which has been great. I'm really happy to be back at work there; I had forgotten what an integral part of my social life it was, much like working at Murphy's Irish Pub was for me in Sonoma. Plus, I come home with my pockets filled with cash, and I get to ski for free on a regular basis.

But the ski season doesn't last forever. It lasts until mid-April. After that, they boot us off the hill and we're made to fend for ourselves.

In the past Bridger Bowl has had a Thursday-Sunday summer season in which the mid-mountain lodge is opened to the public as a restaurant and for weddings, but that plan has already been downsized to weddings only for this summer.

That leaves the following choices: a) Crank up the querying a notch and get more freelancing gigs. Which I should be doing anyway, but I'm having way too much fun with skiing and ice climbing. In the summer I'll be having way too much fun with hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, and kayaking.

So then there's b) Go back to my old summer job at the Pioneer Grill in Grand Teton National Park. There I'll be able to play in the mountains to my heart's content and then some, and make tons of dough for possible international travel after season's end.

It's tempting, isn't it? But what will happen to the fledgling freelance career I've put so much time into building? Will it fly straight out the window? Will I return to Bozeman starting at Square One again?

What to do, what to do...

I suppose I could work in a regular year-round restaurant in Bozeman... but that sounds too much like a real job. Lame!

If you have any advice, I'd love to hear it.

And doggone it, people like me!

In regards to this morning's post (see below), I've decided to take the Stuart Smalley approach. Imagine me pulling up a mirror and saying:

"I want to be a professional freelance writer. I want to do this in Bozeman, Montana. I want to cover people and events I myself find interesting. I want to write for magazines and newspapers, based in print or on the Internet, that have an appreciation and respect for my talent, and that challenge me in ways that I find constructive. I want to be paid well for my efforts."

Okay, that was weird. It better work.

Sometimes I'm just not in the mood

Yesterday, and even talking to people at the brunch party today, I felt my freelance career was going fairly well - slowly but steadily I've been making progress. But every now and then I'm hit with this sense that I'm not cut out for this business and I'll never make it because it's just too hard. I feel like if I let go of the struggle for one moment the whole thing will fall apart... and sometimes I'm not in the mood to struggle. Sometimes I just want someone to say, "This is your assignment, go do it and we'll pay you."

I think it was the winter issue of Outside Bozeman that set me off. I have an article on Nima Sherpa scheduled for the spring issue, but nothing in this one. I had contacted them about writing something for the winter article a while back, but at the time I really didn't have any ideas of my own, and they had enough queries to not be interested in thinking up something for me, so I ended up with nothing. Now the issue comes out, and its full of writers with good ideas and good articles, as well as interviews with several successful Bozeman-area outdoors writers. And I just felt like all those people are better than me. They're motivated, they work hard, they have good ideas which they pursue.

Of course, I'm like that some of the time. I'm about halfway done with my Everglades article, and I don't even have a place to put it. I kind of think that sometimes we have to come to the breaking point before things start to fall into place. That's how it was for me with the Sonoma Valley Sun, when I first started freelancing for them -- I had been working at Murphy's, just filling in, and there was barely any work at all in the winter. I went to the Sun more or less out of desperation, and that ended up working out so well. I could only wonder why I waited so long.

There is an element of lonliness to this life that's probably the hardest part for anyone... but it may part of why I'm drawn to it. And I don't think I'm that different from other writers in this regard. Human interaction is foreign and exciting and fraught with danger. I'm only comfortable with people I'm most comfortable with -- but even that could be a total stranger. God, it's like I'm from another planet or something. Despite the fear, I crave it. People. I must have met tens of thousands of people, waiting tables in so many restaurants, going up cold to total strangers... And interviewing them's no different. I call them, out of the blue, and go into their homes and ask them questions sometimes their closest friends won't even ask.

And yet, here I am, alone in the basement, convincing myself that it's my calling. Trying to embrace my contradictions, as if within them lies some kind of salvation, or at least a paycheck.