Tag: editor

Freelancing: the Ugly, the Bad, and the Good

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This leap has barely begun, and already, I’m learning that nothing is certain with freelancing. One month, I can have more work than I can handle, and the next month, there may be crickets. It’s an exercise in managing emotions. Don’t let yourself go crazy and spend lots of money when you’re working; don’t despair and panic when you’re not. One offer can change the month in an instant. But even with the fun of working for yourself, there are some tricky areas to navigate.

Scammers (The Criminally Ugly)

The most frustrating thing about freelancing is scammers. Once you learn their habits, they’re easy to spot — often, they didn’t verify their method of payment. However, they’ve evolved as the freelancers learned to avoid them. Now, they will verify a method of payment, but if you look at other details, you begin to see a pattern. It’s always the first time they’ve posted an ad and have never spent a dime on the site. It’s always entry-level work for more than others are paying. Another tell-tale sign is a similar list of job responsibilities or requirement bullet points in the ad.

What is infuriating is that these scammers target people simply trying to earn a living. None of us are likely wealthy, and none of us can afford to lose what little we have, yet that is exactly who these criminals go after.

Exploiters (The Legally Ugly)

But in some ways, they are not the biggest criminals on the site. That falls to the people who want you to edit their 100K word manuscript for $70. When you break that down to the number of hours you would have to put in on a project that size, you would make pennies an hour. Would the writer/publisher of this book be willing to work for so little? Then why ask others to do that for you. It should be a crime.

Shifting Sands (The Bad)

There are other frustrations. For a while, the recommendation was to always use AI to write your cover letters, as they would stand out and have all the keywords from the application. I’ve been doing that, with heavy editing, of course, until I got rejected from an application because it was written with AI. Things are always shifting, and they never seem to favor the freelancer.

Growing Creativity and Opportunity (The Good)

While working in the freelance world, I came up with a business idea that won’t let go. It’s a mobile phone app for something useful and needed, and there is nothing like it on the market at the moment.

I researched and found that apps can be costly to develop and launch. Many times in my life, I have had an idea but no way to get there, then watched someone with more resources reap the rewards and accolades for the thing I could not do. Once again, it seemed a way forward might be impossible, but there’s a part of me that isn’t going to let that happen this time. I found a developer on Upwork that is still financially out of reach for me but is closer to my reality. I have invested some money into developing the app, will create a business plan, and hope to find a couple of investors who might want to make a little money while also allowing me to find some financial freedom. Once the investors are in place, I will complete the app development and get it on the market.

As ugly as freelancing can feel at times, I’m still loving it. My work in June got me a Top Seller badge, which should help with getting hired in the future. My creativity is flourishing. I have time for personal development. I have time to enjoy life. And even with occasional moments of terror where I’m not sure I will make this work, for the most part, there is joy. It’s nice to finally be in a place where things are happening. While crashing at the bottom of the canyon is still a very real possibility, the excitement that I may not, seems to be winning.

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A Life of Leaping into the Unknown

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My life has been a series of leaps of faith. I started leaping at just 20 when I transferred to a school in Hawaii I’d never even visited. The school wasn’t quite what I expected, and I left after a semester. Still, I continued to live and work in Hawaii for another year. I didn’t stick the landing, but I did land. It was a fun adventure, and many lessons were learned about a new culture and what it was like to be a minority.

Leaping to Yellowstone

I leaped back home, with a soft landing because of friends and family. I had a solid job in Sioux Falls, but I was miserable. I wasn’t pursuing my dreams. I was living a life of quiet desperation. So I quit my permanent job for a seasonal job in Yellowstone with no promise of work after a few months. Foolish, but I leaped anyway and nailed the landing. I had the summer of my life, meeting a lifelong friend in my roommate and realizing this leaping thing could keep going.

Heading to the Grand Canyon

Together with my roommate, we leaped to the Grand Canyon. Yet another seasonal job with no promise of work after a few months. This one would leave me a long way from home, unemployed. Oh well, there I went. The culture at the Grand Canyon was so different than the adventurous one at Yellowstone, so there was no interest in sticking around. While my roommate leaped back to Yellowstone, I kept skipping west to California.

The Giant Leap to California

Until that point in my life, whenever I’d leaped somewhere, I’d had a dorm or friends to get me started in a new location. My first genuinely huge leap of faith was when I moved to California. I had no one. If I was going to succeed there, it would be 100% on me. I remember being absolutely terrified the night before I moved into my tiny, cockroach-infested studio apartment in Hollywood. No job. No experience. I grew up in a town of 420 people. How was I supposed to function in the 2nd largest city in the country? I held the massive Thomas Guide, with hundreds of pages of city streets, and knew I was in over my head. But then I decided I knew how to get to the apartment I’d rented. I would learn the blocks around it and the blocks around those blocks until I knew the city. And that’s how it worked, except for the first day when I went in search of a store to buy a telephone and, once there, realized I had no idea how to get home. This was 1990, before smartphones. I eventually figured it out and went on to stick the landing in California, with a 25-year career in film and television, which included winning an Emmy with some really great people.

Backflip to Missouri

But you know, once you start leaping, I guess it’s hard to quit because then I did a backflip to Missouri. That was also pretty terrifying. It was a new culture and a very red culture. (If I’d had any idea what was coming in 2016, I wonder if I would have moved here.) Thankfully, doors opened, and I feel like I pretty much stuck that landing with a wobble here or there. It feels like home.

New Doors Open

The pandemic was hard, but it also opened a door. Sites like Fiverr and Upwork made the world of freelance remote work available to anyone with the Internet and a bit of skill with words. Finally, what I wanted to do most seemed within reach, just in a different form. Surprisingly, the editing and writing work I have been getting has been less on those sites and more through word of mouth here in town. Those jobs have allowed me to leave my library job behind. But I’ve still felt crunched for time with a full-time job and freelance work, leaving little time to line up new work. So it’s time to leap again.

Just a Hop

This time it’s a little leap. I’ve reduced my hours to part-time at my day job. I have some income, but not enough on its own. Eek! Freelancing is a never-ending hustle. There’s a reason I jumped at a chance at a network show back in LA when it was offered. Had I known it was a dead end, I might have reconsidered. Still, all I knew was that it was a break from constantly wondering if you’d work the next week or from working so much that you weren’t sure if you’d get a night of sleep that week, so I grabbed it. I used to say I gave up my dreams for security, and ended up with neither. This time I’m risking my security for my dreams. We’ll see how that turns out.

Embracing the Hustle

Thankfully this time I have a fantastic mentor, which I’ve never had before. More free time will allow me to get my online sites firing on all cylinders. It will allow me to have the time to do whimsical things that feed creativity – go to a movie, walk over to the art museum, or meet a friend for a meal. And that will allow me to start working on my own writing again.

So, here I go… see you on the other side.

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Hanging on and Screaming My Fool Head Off

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Life is definitely a roller coaster ride. The last year or two has felt like I’ve been in a terrifying free fall. But, in the long straight section at the bottom, I began to make plans and adjustments to avoid a big crash.


So, during the last few months of the year, what little free time I had was spent either taking online courses or applying for jobs on Upwork. It was tedious and demoralizing. One job paid all of a dollar. Another paid a whopping $10 ($8 after Upwork gets its cut), but I spent so much time on the job it probably brought my pay to .50 an hour. This is the price you must pay on a site like Upwork, where you must develop a reputation before anyone is willing to pay a decent rate. Nevertheless, I pushed ahead, knowing I had to pay my dues to get where I wanted to go. It didn’t seem like I would probably have much financial success in the first year, so it seemed best to put my nose to the grindstone and muscle through.


In the meantime, I talked about my business venture to anyone who would listen. I called the local university writing center, emailed the local writer’s guild, and mentioned it to friends, acquaintances, and clients. One of those conversations led to me being hired on a small team of writers and editors, rewriting and republishing a self-help book. This project will last through the summer. Suddenly I wasn’t scrounging for .50-an-hour jobs; I had a real gig.


As I got to know the team leader better, I realized she was successfully doing exactly what I hoped to do. My whole life, I have craved a mentor. I have the skills but lack the confidence and know-how to move forward. Despite being told throughout my life that I am a talented writer, I have permanent failure to launch issues. That is something a mentor could help me with. Our team leader was someone I clicked with and who had the skills I needed. So I summoned my courage and asked her to be my mentor. She quickly agreed, and suddenly I have someone in my corner who can help me through this confusing maze.


So after a year or so of struggling with finances, trying to find a path forward, and barely maintaining any hope things would ever get better, the needed changes are finally falling into place. Besides the book, I have smaller jobs with blogs and a podcast. With any luck, the current work will lead to more work, and my business will be off and running. Today I filed the articles of organization with the Secretary of State for my new LLC. Tomorrow I will get the EIN and register my business with the state. It feels momentous. It feels freeing.


Whoo, doggie, this section of my roller coaster ride has had some rapid elevation changes. Although I am now climbing, inching up slowly with clickety clacks along the way, I need to remember there will likely be a drop ahead, and I need to hang on. The wild ride isn’t over yet. Not until they put me in the ground.

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Yippee! Another rejection!

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After my recent rewrite, and having found Diana Urban’s blog post about querying, this time around things are going much better. If you are querying, check out the blog post for some great information. I won’t write about all her suggestions, but I’m going to share the two I wasn’t doing that are really making a difference for me.

From day one, the entire querying process has been daunting. You only have a few paragraphs in the query letter to get them to read a sample, which is what will hopefully lead them to ask for the manuscript. I’d done some reading online and gotten some advice from an editor, but each time I sent a letter out, it felt like an experiment. The problem was, if the experiment didn’t work, you couldn’t just try again with the same agent. Most were then off limits unless you did a major rewrite.

To solve this problem, new author Diana Urban urges querying authors to hire a professional, such as an editor or junior agent. From my understanding, junior agents assist agents. One way they assist is by screening queries. If you want your manuscript to make it to an agent, you first have to get past the junior agent. (And if I’m wrong about that, they at least likely know what agents want.) By hiring a Jr. agent to edit your query package, you can be sure it includes all the elements an agent would want to see. Ms. Urban recommended two people, and I chose K. Johnson Editorial. She provided great feedback that allowed me to improve my query letter, synopsis, and submission pages. It seems I’m already seeing results and will hire her again for my other synopses.

The other suggestion that has been so helpful is to use QueryTracker. Part of the pain of my previous querying attempt was the silence, and slow, erratic drip of rejections. Now I can see what other QueryTracker users have submitted to the agents. I can see which of those submissions has been rejected or had a full manuscript request. Because of that, I can see where my query is in the process and the rejections don’t come completely out of the blue. Are there still 10 manuscripts between mine and the ones rejected? I know I have a while to wait. Or, like recently, I could see that manuscripts before mine, and after mine had been rejected, leading me to believe it had made it past the junior agent, and was waiting to be reviewed by the agent. While it was still eventually rejected, that information from QueryTracker gave me so much hope.

And my most recent rejection gave me my best hope yet. Literary agencies receive hundreds of queries each week. We authors are dying to know why we were rejected, but they don’t have time to tell us. It’s frustrating, but totally understandable. This week’s rejection came with really useful feedback. If they didn’t see potential, they wouldn’t have bothered with feedback, and I now know if I can introduce my character in the way they’re looking for, I can sell this book. The story, query, and synopsis are where they should be. The first chapter is not.

I have a long weekend of work ahead of me, but I’m very excited to get to it. I believe the first full manuscript request is just around the corner. That doesn’t mean an agent, but it means another step forward, and right now, that’s all I need.

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Chinese Water Torture

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It’s maddening. It truly is. The slow yet constant drip of rejections, coming at an unpredictable rate. I never know when I’m going to open my mailbox to find a letter from an agency I queried. I got one Sunday morning, when I wouldn’t have expected agents were responding to queries. Then I got one last night before bed. Sweet dreams.

Without even opening these emails, I immediately feel defeated somehow knowing it’s a rejection. Lately I try to pause and allow myself the sliver of hope that it might be a request for my manuscript. I remind myself that things can change any second. It only takes one yes. The results haven’t been any better.

Then I read a tweet from an author saying, “My lifelong dream to be a published author is finally coming true.” I clicked on her profile.

She’s 24. Her lifelong dream has maybe been ten years.

As someone who is susceptible to insecurity and a lack of confidence, the battle to keep going is requiring more energy than I expected. I’ve decided I need to do two things. First, I need to look at the first five pages, which is pretty much all they allow you to send them. When I wrote this chapter, it was in chronological order, and my editor snatched it from the middle of the book and made it my prologue. I’ve realized there are things discussed in that chapter that would be familiar to the reader by the time they got to the middle, but would have no meaning whatsoever to someone not yet immersed in this world. I need to look at this chapter with fresh eyes and see what can be improved. The difficulty with that is that my prologue is already at 5 pages, and if I expand on description, I will not be able to send the entire prologue as my sample.

After I’ve improved those first five pages, I need to read the entire manuscript. I’m beginning to doubt my story, my writing, my characters, and pretty much everything else. I know when I’ve read it before, I’ve gotten sucked in and kept turning the pages. I need to remind myself of that. It’s been long enough since I read it that it might even feel a little fresher. I need to regain my confidence that someone will recognize the value in the story I’m telling, and I just need to keep looking for them.

So many agents are looking for books with a quick hook, and I’ve read those books. They’re fun. But a year later, I couldn’t tell you the plot or characters of most of them. I might remember the stunning location where it was set or maybe a scene that was impactful but the rest fades away. They’re fast food fiction. Really enjoyable in the moment, but not really sustaining.

My story doesn’t have such a quick hook. I’d like to think it’s intriguing, but I take my time introducing characters and unwinding the story at a comfortable pace. As the book moves along, and the conflict builds, so does the pace. So is it going to grab you by the throat right away? Probably not. It’s why I’m so frustrated that the entire book is judged by the first few pages. Not only can you not judge a book by it’s cover, you can’t truly judge a book by it’s first few pages.

Now, I get it. Agents are buried under queries and manuscripts. One agency responded in their rejection letter that they get 500 queries a week. One agency – 500 queries in a week. How could anyone possibly keep up with that? There has to be a quick way to weed through and focus on the best choices, so they’ve decided the first five pages and a snappy query letter are the way to do it. I wonder how many quality novels have slipped through the cracks because of it.

There’s nothing to do about it, but keep searching for an agent that will give it a read. I’ve also found two publishers that will accept hardcopy manuscript submissions without an agent, so I intend to print one out and get that in the mail soon. And of course the final option will be to self-publish and let the public decide. The amount of marketing I’ll have to do is daunting, but hopefully I’ll have book two finished by then and in the editing process (if I can afford it) so can focus more on marketing.

Until then I will reread, perhaps rewrite, and try to keep my sanity and hope under the drip, drip, drip of rejections.

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Another Step Forward

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Progress is never a straight line. It’s always a few steps forward, a few steps back. That’s exactly what the past few months have been for me.

While waiting for my editor to return to work, I had someone from my target audience read Fear Unleashed — a 12-year-old girl who reads voraciously and loves scifi/fantasy. The verdict? She loved it. I even had a chance to sit down and ask her a few questions and hear her suggestions. It was a confidence booster. She was anxious to read the next book, so I better get it finished! One step forward.

Beyond the test of patience while I waited for my editor to return to action, it felt like I was faced with another test. I came home last week, opened my mailbox, and instantly my heart froze in my chest. It was a letter from the IRS. It’s the one piece of mail that instantly signals bad news. It’s never a letter saying, “Hey, we found out you overpaid and now we’re sending you thousands of dollars.” It’s never that. No, it’s always something scary and something bad. I instantly went to a dark place. I saw my dream ending. I saw the last of my savings gone. This leap left little room for error. A serious illness, injury, a totaled car… all things that could put me in a desperate place. I never figured in the IRS, but that could do it too. It felt like once again the football was being pulled away just as I was kicking. A huge step backward.

I went to the dark place, but I didn’t stay. Even as a lead ball formed in my gut, I attempted to reason my way out. I read and reread the letter, looking for an indication of what they thought I might owe. While I realized it would be painful, I could take the loss. I got ahold of my accountant, and was reassured that everything was fine. This was a computer error that would quickly be straightened out by him. Once I got him all the forms he needed and signed where I needed to sign, I felt back on track. Having had a chance to get my feet under me for the past two years, it was easier to regain my balance. Being a part of a supportive community also helps me remain steady.  So, I managed to deal with a delay in submitting my manuscript, and a threat to my finances without losing hope. Yay, me! Two steps forward.

Today I finally took the next big step forward. The manuscript is in the hands of a literary agency. It may be months before they make a decision, so there is nothing for me to do at this point except keep writing and wait. But Fear Unleashed‘s journey has begun. Will this be the start of rejection until I finally find a “yes?” Or will I defy the odds and land an agent straight off? Stay tuned to the unfolding saga.

And even though I’m celebrating my steps forward, I recognize I will surely have to take a step or two back yet again. Going with it instead of fighting it, is a more graceful response and turns the whole process into a dance. And that’s what I’m hoping to do… dance all the way to publication. Cha cha cha.

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April Fools & Merry Christmas

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For months now I have been telling people my book was done. I believed it was done. After all, I was at 75,000 words and a first time YA novelist in the scifi/fantasy genre typically shouldn’t go above 80,000. So, I found a passable ending and stopped the first book of three. The end.

April fools! No it’s not!

I was never happy with this forced ending. No one who’s read it was happy with it. But what’s a first time author to do? I had no more words.

Except I do!

You see, my editor had cut 15,000 words, and it finally dawned on me that I had more room for a better ending! It will make this book stand alone, which is awesome! It also brings this book closer to my original vision for it.

I am excited to be back to writing, and can’t wait to see the result. It’s always fun to find out what happens next. Despite the fact that I have to sometimes drag myself to my chair as if I’m a kid being told to take a nap, just like that napping kid, once I’m doing it, it’s the best thing ever. Wish I could spend every day this way.

So that’s my April Fools. Now Christmas.

It seemed like it had been years since I had gotten a cold, but this year, they all caught up to me. So far I’ve had two doozies, with this last one being the worst. Perhaps it falls into the flu category, not sure. It hit on Wednesday night and it wasn’t until today, the following Monday, that I feel human again. Because of that, my Christmas was spent alone in front of either a book or the TV. I had said I wanted a quiet Christmas at home this year. Be careful what you wish for.

Despite this sad state of affairs, I actually had a really great Christmas present in the form an of an email from my editor. He told me there is a literary agency lined up to read my book when it’s ready. I was stunned and excited. Of course this doesn’t really mean anything. They might read it and politely tell me to take a flying leap, at which point I can tell them that I already have.

Still, knowing I have a toe wedged in the door, gave me a huge boost on what was at moments feeling like a woe-is-me Christmas morning. It’s no surprise really that I’m feeling better today. This should really push me to finish. The brass ring is in sight. My arm is reaching. I can almost feel the slick metal in my hands… almost…

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Adapting and Evolving

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Writing my first book turned out to be easier than I had expected. You so often hear about the agonies of writer’s block, and hours spent staring at the ceiling, looking for inspiration. I did not experience that. Sometimes I didn’t feel inspired to write, but I always had words to put on the page.

That stems from the fact that despite it being my first book, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I’ve been writing for most of my life and learning along the way. One book that made a huge difference was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I never made it through the book, but I made it far enough to benefit. One exercise has you write three pages of stream-of-consciousness every morning. It might be, “There is nothing in my brain. Oh, I need eggs. Shoot, I don’t have time to go to the grocery store. I can wait. Look at that cute guying walking his dog.” It really didn’t matter what you wrote, you were to just write. That exercise teaches you one main thing. Your words aren’t that precious. They flow constantly in a never-ending stream. Just put them on paper, they can always be fixed later.

As a writer, that was eye-opening. I had agonized over words in the past, and often stopped writing because I couldn’t find the right ones. No more! My method became to spit it out the best you can and fix it later.

The other book that helped me was On Writing by Stephen King. With 25 years of writing screenplays, I had become a slave of the outline. When you have to cram an entire story into just two hours, getting all the beats right is not only difficult, but crucial. It’s like doing a Rubik’s cube. But, for me, the outline took all the joy out of writing.

Stephen King taught me to let go of the outline and let the story tell itself. Don’t worry about where it’s going. Don’t worry about structure. Just let the story unwind. Let it sit, then when you come back to read it, you will see obvious themes. Rewrite everything to those themes and voila… you have a really good, well-crafted story. Now working in novels, and not tightly structured screenplays, I can more easily follow his advice.

Cameron and King were the foundation of the easy flow of my first book. It was great, but the editing process showed me the cracks in my foundation.

With book one I did not edit. I didn’t want to slow down the flow. However, when I got to the end of a 75,000 word novel, I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of editing needed. I didn’t know where to start. I was too impatient to get it to an agent and publisher and couldn’t seem to take the time I needed to really evaluate and fix the manuscript… especially since my “just dump it on the page” method left a lot to be fixed. Thankfully I have a miracle worker of an editor who did all my heavy lifting for me this time around.

Last weekend, with the major editing behind me on book one, it felt like it was time to turn my mind to book two. I sat down and started to let the story flow again. Oh, what joy! Much to my surprise, I discovered that once again, my process is adapting and evolving. In the past it was common to write 2000 words a day. This time around, 1000 words seems to be the mark to hit. Now, I actually catch myself writing in the passive voice. I see where a verb could be more active. Or dialog can have more impact. I stop, consider my sentence, and rework it. My editor had warned me about this, but so far I don’t feel like it’s a problem. It slows me down, yes, but it doesn’t stop the flow. In some ways, it makes it far more enjoyable. Like savoring the scene instead of racing to put it down.

And this time I will set aside some time each writing day to go back and edit the previous day’s work. That way when I get to the end, I won’t be quite so overwhelmed. My first draft will be a much more polished, ready-to-publish, work.

Everything in life is a process. Just because you’re good at something today doesn’t mean you can’t be better at it if you adapt and evolve. Even this old dog is learning a few new tricks.

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Hiring an Editor – Check

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A little over a week ago I contacted an editor and sent him my manuscript. I’m studying quantum physics for the next book, and so for the past week it’s felt like my manuscript has been like Shrodinger’s cat… neither alive nor dead, nothing but waves of potentiality. Surprisingly, rather than feeling frustrated by the wait, the anticipation and possibility of anything happening was lovely.

Tonight the wave became a solid particle, and I now have a highly-experienced  professional’s opinion about my book. As expected, there is good and bad. Some of the bad can easily be fixed. Some of it may have deep roots that will be difficult to untangle… not impossible, just difficult.

He pointed out bad habits that I have developed – some are remnants of my screenwriting days, one is the very common bad habit of writing in the passive voice, and the rest are just personal weaknesses. Hopefully the more I am aware of my flaws, the harder I can work to fix them in my future writing.

There were also compliments, which provided some encouragement to keep trying. It’s very nice having a professional in the publishing world describe your manuscript as enjoyable and entertaining. So, as I watch my savings dwindle, I feel encouraged that it’s not time to go to plan B just yet.

What’s next? I don’t know. I am a babe in the woods when it comes to the publshing world. My guess – I go back to work with the guidance of my editor, and when we have something polished I start writing query letters to agents and publishers. Will that lead to a publishing house? It’s a roll of the dice, but at least in today’s world, there is the option to self-publish. One way or another, I will have a published book, what is in question is what reach it will have.

I just have to keep checking things off the list. Step by step. Bit by bit. It’s how every dream becomes a reality.

What’s the next thing on your dream’s checklist?

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