Pricetag failure

Had I succeeded with the freelance proposal I submitted on this day, I would have been 250 dollars richer, just as, had Beasley kept his word, I would have had an additional 55 towards housekeeping. Adds up. The amounts involved would have been long gone since, but any amount is better than zero. I have slowed down, due to transitioning between accounts, and other activities you have read about above, but I also have to get better, honing trade market to idea, so I have retracted slightly into the old paradigm under which most writers get no money at all, and that is, leaning on my own hardcopy development.

I am going to let you in on a small secret that will make me even more popular with literary and independent magazine editors. Yessssss, reading recent issues matters, but not really, not for the classifieds from my former MFA syndicate. You learn after a while it is like a lottery. Get creative enough with your imagery and some editor somewhere will offer you a blow job or tit nibble. It may not be the high end, like Paris Review, or my near obsession, a before death correspondent byline in Atlantic Monthly, and note, I did not say fiction, or poetry, but an article, but anything you scribble, someone will give you space for it without pay.

Now, real freelancing, the hard stuff, the trades, policy wonks, medical, health-- that, my children, is where sources and study actually matters, and it still is not easy to do. Off contract, I hit pay dirt three or four times. Creative writing is useless, and no one will tell you that, because terminal degree holders need a job. Writing to earn a living is not the same as a novelist who gets lucky and then has a marketable franchise. It was not easy before digital and Amazon squeezed the purse, and it is worse now.

Able bodied writers do get day jobs of course, but you know I am a quadriplegic, and my special transit access curbed, along with the usual violins. Listen to your teachers, if not me, and vice versa. Go to law school, become a CPA, have a fallback. This is a brutal game. What was my idea? Hearing loss, and I fumbled. Next bullseye.