Goals & Dreams

A Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book Second Edition

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Contents

Introduction

The Difference Between Goals And Dreams

Patience

Expectations

Giving Up On Yourself

Staying Positive

Reaching For Your Dreams

About the Author

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

We all dream, but only a handful of us know how to make our dreams come true. This short book will help you turn your wishes into reality.

Introduction

Everyone has dreams. Most of us have goals. However, many of us don’t realize when our goals cross into our dreams or even get in the way of them. And most of us don’t know how to make our dreams a reality.

These posts from my Freelancer’s Survival Guide discuss how to turn your dreams into achievable goals. The posts also examine whether or not to postpone your dreams as well as figuring out when you’re giving up on yourself.

Since April of 2009, I have written The Freelancer’s Survival Guide on my blog, kristinekathrynrusch.com. Most of the advice in the Guide is practical—how to set up a business plan, for instance. The Freelancer’s Survival Guide is also available in book form.

However, I’ve also divided the Guide into short books for people who don’t need or want more than one section. Again, most of those short books involve business things, like handling finances or how to negotiate a contract. But this book is a little different. It’s about the emotions of freelancing, about dreams and wishes and aspirations. In other words, this short book is the important one.

These posts were written at separate times throughout the course of a year. I’ve tried to keep the flavor of the real-time posting, while making sure the book itself has a flow. If you want to see the original blog posts, you can find them—and reader comments—on the blog itself.

The point of this short book, however, is to help you achieve your dreams. I hope it does that and so much more.

Enjoy.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

August 29, 2010

I updated the “Giving Up On Yourself” section in 2011 on my website. Things are changing dramatically. It took longer than I expected to update this book, but now I have, and I hope that makes it even more useful for you.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

April 19, 2012

The Difference Between Goals And Dreams

We use the words “goals” and “dreams” interchangeably. We achieve our goals, pursue our dreams. We pursue our goals, achieve our dreams. But goals and dreams are very different. A shorthand way of thinking about this comes from football.

That weird little H-shaped thingie sticking out of the end zone?  It’s called a goalpost, not a dreampost. I think football would be an entirely different game if it had a dreampost. Hockey would be different too, if the players tried to get the puck past the dreamer.

In fact, the difference between a goalie and a dreamer are as illustrative as the difference between goalpost and dreampost. As I go on here, playing with words, you’re starting to get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Goals, simply put, are something you achieve. My Encarta World English Dictionary gives me five definitions of “goal.”  Four are connected to sports, including number five, which is “the end of a race.” Number four is the only non-sports related definition of the word: “something that somebody wants to achieve.”

Achieve. We achieve our goals. Goals are an end product. The other definitions include phrases like “a successful attempt at…” or “the score gained…”

There are no words like “successful” or “gained” in the definition of dream. Nor does the definition of dream include the word “achieve.”

The same dictionary gives the noun “dream” six definitions, and most of them involve sleep or inattention or thoughts. First, of course, the dictionary discusses those visions our mind serves up when we’re sleeping. It also discusses the daydream.

The two definitions that concern us are the third and the fourth. I’m going to start with the fourth: “An idea or hope that is impractical or unlikely to ever be realized.” If that were the definition of goal, then every single sports team in the world would be in trouble. (Of course, I’ve known a few football teams bad enough to make a win an impractical hope.)

The third definition is a little more upbeat: “Something that somebody hopes, longs, or is ambitious for, usually something difficult to attain or far removed from the present circumstances.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. And since I try to be very practical in the Guide, and you all seem to recognize that, you probably think I’m going to tell you to abandon your dreams and set goals.

Nope.

Both dreams and goals are necessary for success. You just have to understand the difference between them.

Deep down understand it.

I don’t think a freelancer can survive long without a dream. I think the more impossible the dream the better. If you don’t set that impossible dream high enough, you’ll achieve your dream and stop striving.

When students apply for the Master Class that my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and I teach (along with four other established professional writers), we ask those students what their goals are and what their secret, most impossible dream is. The only students we take for the Master Class are those with either a professional career that has stalled (for some reason) or those with a strong work ethic who are having trouble breaking into publishing (and have excellent, professional-level skills).

We look at the goals and the secret dream more than any other part of the application. Because if the goals and the secret dream are nonexistent, we have learned that the writers often don’t have the capability to survive the Master Class, let alone the business of writing itself.

What does an impossible dream add to a career? Purpose. Plain and simple. That dream is like the shining city on a hill, the one you can see in the distance and might never reach. But until your dying day, you’ll head for that hill.

The other thing that the impossible dream adds is a sense of hope. As long as you have something grand to strive for, you also have something grand to hope for. Hope gets us through the dark times better than anything else.

When hope disappears, so, too, does drive.

Which is why it’s so hard to succeed on a long-term level if you have easily achieved dreams. If you lack that one huge impossible dream. Because you might reach that city on the hill within the first few years of your professional career. And then, what will you do? What will you hope for? What will you daydream about?

I think the daydream part is also essential. You need something to entertain your imagination while you’re working day to day. If you’re an actor, you might spend time every day studying fancy gowns for your trip down the red carpet for your tenth Oscar nomination. Not your first, not your fifth, your tenth. Your impossible dream might be to have more Oscar nominations than Meryl Streep.

But if your impossible dream as an actor is to have a small part in a film—well, you might achieve that dream the day you sign up as an extra in a large crowd scene. That’s a dream you can attain in my tiny town on the Oregon Coast. Dozens of movies have been filmed here since I’ve lived here, and lots of locals have had their mugs on the screen, if only for a few seconds. A few of the locals actually had small speaking parts. Heck, my husband’s best friend—an attorney—had a speaking role in a commercial filmed in Idaho. Because of that thirty seconds on the nation’s television screens, our attorney friend is one of Idaho’s members in the Screen Actors Guild.

Had his lifelong dream been to become an actor—someone who qualified for the Screen Actors Guild—then he did so in a single outing with a single commercial. But if his lifelong dream had been to become a famous star of stage and screen, someone who had not just an Oscar, but also an Emmy and a Tony, someone who had a lead role on Broadway, as well as starring roles in hit movies or hit TV shows—well then, he has a long, long way to go.

See the difference? Even those things I listed above might not be enough for that impossible dream. An actor might want to be considered the greatest actor of his generation. A writer might want to have the bestselling book of all time. A storeowner might want to create the largest store franchise in the world.

Because these are dreams, not goals, it’s okay to noodle on them, to see them as a shining light in the distance, as something to work toward, but not something to count on.

Goals, on the other hand, are stepping stones. Goals must be achievable. Goals should build on each other.

Go back to the football analogy. A football game in which a score is just a dream would be the dullest thing on the planet. In fact, football players wouldn’t even have to face off. They could sit on the field, if they wanted, and imagine the score. Of course, no one would come to the game—because there wouldn’t be a game. Just a dream of a game.

But football is a game of inches. It is built on phrases like “first and goal.” The game itself sets up tiny goals that lead to a touchdown. And if the team fails in one tiny goal, then the ball goes to the other team, which then tries to achieve a series of small goals to get to the larger one.

The dream for football players isn’t to win one game. A lot of players achieve that as early as the age of eight or ten, in a Pee-Wee Football League. Or they have the game-winning run (or the game-winning pass) as early as the first game of their high school career.

The dream for football players is to play in the Super Bowl. Or to win the Super Bowl. Or to be the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player—not once, but several times throughout their career.

That’s a dream that can’t be achieved without a lot of goals—small and large. From getting on the varsity team in high school, to playing well enough to stay, to winning game after game, to play in college, to play well enough to get drafted into the National Football League, to play in the NFL (not sit on the bench), to be a part of a very good team, to win games inch by inch, yard by yard, year-in and year-out, to win a division, and to go to the big game, and then, to win it. More than once. Not-so-tiny goals, all leading to the big dream.

Not every professional football player makes the playoffs. A professional football player can have a successful—a highly successful—career without ever once playing in the Super Bowl. But if that player retires before he gets the chance to play in the biggest game of all, he will know he never did quite achieve his dream. (I think this is why so many players try to become coaches. They might not get to the big game as a player, but they want to try as a coach.)

A goal is “something somebody wants to achieve.”  It’s “the end of a race.” Goals, in some ways, are the opposite of dreams. If you set your goals too high, you’ll get discouraged and quit. If you set your dreams too low, you’ll get discouraged and quit.

So, how do you set goals? You start with easily achievable ones. The best diet programs are set up this way. They don’t put you on a starvation diet of 800 calories per day. If you’ve been eating 4000 calories per day, the diet will reduce your intake to 3500 calories per day. Most people can easily cut 500 calories from their diet. That’s one giant soda or one huge specialty coffee drink or one piece of pie with ice cream. As time goes on, the calorie count goes down incrementally. And the dieter achieves other goals—losing a pound here, fitting into her “skinny” jeans for the first time in years, getting compliments from friends on how good she looks.

However, you can’t stop with the small goals. When you achieve a goal, another needs to take its place. Each goal should be a little more difficult than the last. It’s like running a marathon:  No one can walk out the front door and run 26.2 miles without training. No one, not even the best athletes in the world.

Most people have to walk before they run, and some people can’t even walk an entire block without getting winded. Yet within two years, they’re able to run 26.2 miles. They didn’t increase their distance every day. They walked for a block until they weren’t winded. Then they walked for two. Then three. Eventually, they walked for a few blocks and ran for 100 feet. And on and on.

The other key to following goals is to write them down. First, you need to write down what the goal is. Then, you need to keep a log, one that records your struggles to achieve that goal. You will fail. Be honest about those failures. Then, get back up and try again, until you achieve the goal.

Sometimes, the failures tell you that the early goals are too hard. If so, cut the effort in half, and try again.

The other thing you need is a timetable. Give yourself a realistic amount of time to achieve a goal. Once that goal is achieved, have the next goal ready to go, along with its timetable. This is why I tell you to have daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals.

Throw in five-year and ten-year goals, as well.

Then, revamp them often. Preferably on a monthly basis. As you strive to achieve those goals, you will learn what is realistic for you. No excuses. You need to be one hundred percent honest about what you’re trying to do.

If you’re an underachiever, pay attention to how hard you work. Make sure you’re putting in some real effort and not just slacking off.

If you’re an overachiever, make sure you don’t work too hard.

That last piece of advice comes from me, the woman who now runs about fifteen miles per week. When I started out, I didn’t pay attention to my limits (yes, overachiever), and I achieved…a stress fracture in my foot. Which would have only been a sore foot if I hadn’t been so focused on trying to keep up to the impossible goals I had set myself. It would have become a permanently damaged foot if my husband, the former professional athlete, hadn’t had a long talk with me about knowing my own limitations (and who also dragged me to the doctor).

It’s hard to find a balance between working too hard on your goals and not working hard enough. Which is why I tell you to reassess often. And to be honest with yourself. Because you’re the only one who is going to know if you’re trying too hard or not trying hard enough.

The goals are stepping stones to that impossible dream. They’re the trail through the murk that will lead you to the city on the hill.

They’re also the reality check. Because the farther you get down the road, the more you should reassess. You might not want to go to that city on the hill. You might want to jettison your impossible dream because it’s not something you want to do any longer.

If that’s the case, then you need to find a new dream, or you will stop striving.

I know, I know, I’m speaking in metaphor here. Let me be concrete. One of my early impossible writing goals was to have a career like that of Nora Roberts. But the deeper I got into the writing profession, the more I realized that Nora Roberts and I are very different writers. I would love to have that many bestsellers and all the perks that go with it.

But Nora, for the most part, has stayed within the same genre. She writes all aspects of that genre—romantic suspense, paranormal romance, contemporary romance, even science fiction mystery romance. But the books all center on a couple, either falling in love or striving to maintain their love.

I have a hummingbird brain. I can’t even read one genre for longer than a week. Asking me to write in one genre for the rest of my life would actually be a hardship.

As soon as I realized that, I had to look for a new impossible dream. Which was harder than it sounds. Not many writers write in more than one genre. I had to refine the dream to be something that suited me. I’ve refined several times since then. I still have impossible dreams—but none of them entail writing in the same genre book after book after book.

I reassessed.

If I had wanted a career similar to Nora Roberts’s career, I would have had to change my goals. I would have had to write novels in only one genre (although I could’ve branched into all the subgenres), and I would’ve had to have small goals along the way—writing a contemporary, writing a paranormal (oh, I’ve done that), writing a romantic suspense novel (I’ve done that too!), writing a historical….

You get the picture. My imagination is too dark to sustain a happily-ever-after ending book after book. My sense of whimsy is too powerful to write dark novels book after book. My mind sees too many future possibilities to keep me out of science fiction for too long. But I love to dig deeply into the modern world as well.

I’m not suited for the first city on the hill that I headed toward. However, I’ve found others that suit me better.

If you think of goals as markers along the way toward your impossible dream, then you’ve got the right philosophy. If you confuse goals with dreams, then you’re going to get stuck.

Imagine something grand for yourself.

Then figure out how to achieve it. If achieving it takes only hard work—if there isn’t a little bit of luck and timing involved—then you haven’t found your impossible dream yet. Because an impossible dream should have an element of the impossible to it. An element of being in the right place at the right time.

Know too, that you might never achieve that dream—and that’s okay. Because you’re going to be disappointed when you get to that city. It’ll never ever measure up to your imagination. So, as you’re on the final road toward your dream, make sure there’s a new one waiting in the wings.

And then plan those stepping stones that will get you to your next city on the hill. Set your goals.

Goals are the only thing that will lead to your dream. All of your dreams.

Even those that might never come true.

Patience

Full disclosure time: I have no patience. Or very little patience. I do a good imitation of a person with patience in public, but in my everyday life, I have no idea why everything I want isn’t here the moment I want it.

I do understand the irony of me writing a section of the Guide on patience, but as someone who lacks something but still desires it, I have made a study of patience.

Patience is essential to building a business, any business. You must do things methodically. You must do them in a particular order, and even then, you might not get an immediate response.

This last bit is a particularly difficult part of owning your own business. We believe that when we put our ads out there, launch our websites, mail our stories or open our shop’s door, people will flock in. We’ll get an immediate response.

Often, we get no response at all—at least initially. And sometimes, the only response we get is negative.

All of which we should expect—and plan for. But that doesn’t make it easy. Nor does it become any easier with time.

Every year, my alma mater, Beloit College, puts out its freshman survey. Someone polls the incoming class about various things—mostly trends—and Beloit publishes the results.

The Class of 2009, born in 1991, is Internet savvy, educated, and informed, but the one thing they lack, according to a former professor of mine, Tom McBride, is patience. This group of kids always got what they wanted when they wanted it. Not just things, but television programs, music, text—all at the touch of a finger.

They haven’t learned how to delay gratification—and delayed gratification is what building a business is all about. (You can find 2009’s results here.)

I can handle some forms of delayed gratification. I learned way back when that the process is the important thing, not the result. So with that lesson came another: I learned that I had to enjoy the actual work. If I didn’t enjoy the work, then I couldn’t wait for the result.

This is where my lack of patience works against me. I can wait two weeks or a month or even three months for a check if I enjoyed the work I did to get that check. If I loathe the job, then I want the money immediately. If I don’t get the money immediately, I don’t do any more work. This is why I’m unemployable on the corporate level.

A business—any business—has good and bad days, fun and difficult work. Early in the life of the business, very little positive happens. You set up systems, establish an office or a storefront, hire a few employees (or not), take out ads (or not), make products and hope they’ll sell. You need to get the word out that you are there, wherever there is, and you’re ready to do some work for someone.

Then, when you do work for a few someones, you hope they like it enough to recommend you to someone else. In addition to building your office (or your store or your craft), you’re building your reputation, good and bad.

You’re also building your bank account. In the early days of the business, you’re depleting the money you had saved to start the business. If you hadn’t saved any money, you’re depleting the loan someone (a friend or a financial institution) gave you. As I mentioned before, money goes out the door every single day, but early on, money rarely comes back in.

The early years of a business are all about patience, the early years of a freelance business even more so. You have to be patient as you learn your craft. You have to be patient as you save money to finance the start-up. You have to be patient as you work that day job while you’re trying to build a nest egg. You have to be patient as you line up clients, expertise, product.

You have to be so patient that at times it feels like you are doing nothing but being patient.

It’s tough, especially in our have-it-now society.

Personally—and this is a bit of an aside—I think one of the good things about the current recession is that people are relearning (or in the case of the 20-somethings, learning) how to wait for something they want. Credit has become tougher to get, so you can’t just charge whatever you want even if you can’t afford it. Layaway is back. (I hadn’t realized it had gone away.) Layaway teaches the value of paying for something without having that something until the money is all in.

In some ways, layaway is what happens as you start a business. You’re laying away bits of money, bits of expertise, bits of knowledge, as you prepare for the entire product—which is the ultimate dream.

But patience isn’t just essential as you start a business. It’s essential to maintaining one.

I’m watching a friend do something fascinating. He has completely abandoned the regular publishing model because its difficulties and slowness drive him crazy and is beginning to self-publish his work electronically. Unfortunately, he hasn’t planned for the transition. He doesn’t have money saved so that he can contribute to the household, nor does he know how much money he’ll actually make on the self-published items.

It’s a bold experiment, but he’s doing it as a reaction to the things he doesn’t like about the existing business he has chosen to participate in, not as a studied, planned expansion of the business he has freelanced in for decades.

If he’s lucky, this experiment will work for him. But if the experiment goes as I think it will, he would have been better off working the system he already knew.

Part of the problem is that he’s impatient to join the brave new world of electronic publishing. He’s jumping in with both feet, without doing any of the due diligence that a wise business owner would do.

The world of electronic publishing is new, and it does require a certain amount of faith. But so does all small business, and there are ways to mitigate potential problems that come from the unknown. I’ve discussed some of that in previous posts, and I’ll discuss more in future posts.

But for the moment, let’s stay focused on the issue of patience. How do I, a person with no patience, thrive in a business that requires extreme patience?

I gave you a hint, above.

First, I enjoy the process. I love the work itself. If we got zapped back to the dark ages tomorrow and publishing as we know it disappeared, I’d still write stories on any scrap of paper I could find. I love to write, and that won’t change.

(I seriously do not understand writers who say they hate to write but love having written. That makes my brain hurt every time. If you don’t like what you do, then why do it? There are easier ways to make a living than writing.)

In fact, for me, the process is why I’m in the writing business. I like everything about writing: I like telling stories. I like playing with words. I like research. I like being alone. I like spending my time in made-up worlds.

I also like the process of freelancing. I’m a bad employee. I hate rules and strictures. I prefer to do things my way in my time, which makes me the quintessential freelancer.

I like being in control of my own destiny. I like the fact that if I don’t produce, I don’t get paid. I actually hate the idea of going to a job, sitting at a desk, and twiddling my thumbs while I waited for someone to tell me what to do—all for the sake of a paycheck. If you look at my history, you’ll realize that I lasted a grand total of three months in every job like that I took. (And I only made it three months because that’s about as long as it took me to read every scrap of paper in a normal office.)

But there are many aspects of being my own boss that I don’t like. Unfortunately, most of those aspects are essential to the business’s survival. I have to mail my work. I have to pay the bills. I have to dun the occasional client for payment. I have to troll for new work. And I have to learn new methods of making money in new mediums or new venues.

How do I handle those things?

Several ways.

I plan. That sounds both silly and essential. Of course, I plan. Every business owner should plan. But as I pointed out above, with the example of my friend, most freelancers don’t plan at all. They run after the newest, hottest, shiniest thing. Or they get rid of what’s already working because it makes them uncomfortable in order to try something new because it looks easier.

I research heavily, and then I lay out a potential schedule. I make educated guesses about how long it will take me to learn something or incorporate something or change something.

Then I write that plan down step-by-step in my calendar. As I complete each step, I check it off. If the step is particularly difficult, I reward myself with an afternoon off or an ice cream cone or a very noticeable pat on the back. After I’ve checked that step off, I make sure I’m still on track. If I’ve learned something that changes the schedule, I make the changes before I move to the next step.

Again, I’m elevating the process into its own little returns-and-reward system. Dean does the same thing, only using his white boards. He makes his lists (charts, actually, for him) in erasable ink. Then, as he completes a step, he either marks down the date or erases the step. He can monitor his progress in that way.

Rather than seeing the task—whatever it is—as one big, difficult, long, torturous thing to complete, I make it a series of smaller tasks, all of them easy to complete. That helps with my impatience because I don’t have to wait six months for results. I get results every week or sometimes every single day.

I only schedule things that I control. For example, when you open a store, you can’t say with any certainty when the first customer will walk through the door. All you can do is plan for the moment the store is ready for business.

In publishing, I can’t control when someone will buy something. I can only write to the best of my ability and have a lot of product in the mail to people who might buy it. There are three factors at work here: the product has to be good, there has to be a lot of it, and it has to be in front of someone who will consider it for publication. I can control all three of those things.

So I don’t plan to have sold something by January 1. Instead, I plan to have five short stories done and mailed by that date. And then I move to the next date, and the date after that.

If I work on the things I can control, things that I know will improve my business, then the goodness will follow.

A note here: I have noticed that good things come in waves. In publishing, sales come in waves. As do good reviews or award nominations. This also happens in retail. A store will have several good days in a row, with a lot of customers and sales, followed by weeks of slow days or days with no customers at all. And the irritating thing about this is that the ups and downs are impossible to predict.

So, if you’re always waiting for someone else to do something, then you’ll run out of patience quickly. But if you do the things that you can control, then you’re going to be too busy to notice what that someone else is doing—and when they finally get to it, you’ll be taken by surprise.

In this way, my friend’s plan to self-publish is a good one. He’s taking control of his backlist and his front list.

What he’s missing—at least from the outside—is this next thing.

I maintain my base. By this I mean I continue to do the things that allow my business to thrive. I write short stories in part because I love them and in part because I have an audience for them. I resell things I’ve already published because that’s income for very little work on my part. I am constantly looking for new markets so that when the old ones disappear, I still have work.

As I add in new things (such as slowly adding mystery writing to my science fiction writing), I don’t abandon what has already worked for me. I research the new markets and slowly put a toe into the water, instead of jumping into the deep end, abandoning my safe spot on the shore.

In other businesses, that’s keeping the regular clients while bringing in new clients. Just because one new client promises to give you more work than you can handle doesn’t mean you should take on that client. Research first, see if the money is what is promised, see if the client will actually be someone you want to work with (or for), and then slowly bring that client into your business.

Don’t let the untested new thing take over because you’re impatient for results.

If you’re anything like me, telling you to be patient is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. That’s guaranteed to make me impatient. But if I have a plan, I can take all the time I need to get where I’m going.

Because I enjoy the journey.

And, ultimately, that’s what freelancing is all about. Enjoying the process—and celebrating each positive result.

Expectations

A short time ago, a young writer who did not know my history in the science fiction field mentioned in e-mail how much he hated certain editors. He felt those editors had mislead him and were, therefore, unethical people.

Since those editors happened to be friends of mine of long standing—I’d known both for more than twenty years—I knew they weren’t unethical people. Nor would they deliberately mislead writers.

After a few back-and-forths, I found out what happened: those editors had met this young writer in a networking situation (one a convention, the other a guest lecture at a writer’s workshop) and invited him to submit stories to their various projects.

The writer had submitted stories, which were then kindly, but soundly, rejected. He was furious. He thought the editors had broken an implied promise. By inviting him to submit—he thought—the editors were committing to buy the stories.

Never mind that neither editor had ever seen his work before. Never mind that they had no idea whether he even wrote in the genre.

He hadn’t thought the situation through. A little more probing uncovered something else: he had an improper understanding of the writing field.

Somehow, this young writer had gotten it into his head that most writers sold stories not because the stories were good, but because the writer had met the editor and the editor liked the writer. I have no idea where that idea had come from—it certainly isn’t written down anywhere, even as a myth—but it had embedded itself firmly in this writer’s brain.

(To clarify, in case any others out there have this notion in their minds: stories sell because the stories are good. There are other factors such as what the publisher wants for the magazine/book line. For example, no matter how excellent a hardboiled mystery is, you won’t sell it to a sweet romance book line. It just won’t happen.)

Before you sit back smugly and think that you would never make a mistake like the one this young writer made, realize that everyone who is in business for himself—every single freelancer/business owner—has made this mistake at least once. Many make it every single day.

The mistake comes from unrealistic expectations.

I almost wrote that it comes from expectations (leaving out the word “unrealistic”), and although that might be true (we shouldn’t have expectations; we should have plans), without some measure of expectation, we probably can’t do what we want to do. I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, let’s deal with unrealistic expectations.

When my ex-husband and I opened our frame shop and art gallery twenty-mumble years ago, my ex was the realist (for once). He knew that he couldn’t open the store without a customer base already in place. I was the unrealistic one: I thought that because we had a storefront and a sign above the door and lovely inventory and a talented framer, we would have customers on the very first day we opened. We did, but only because my ex ran his legs off. He planned a grand opening, sent out invitations (with maps), called people, and made sure everyone who needed to know about the store did know. And then he grew the business.

I had Field of Dreams in mind: Somehow, I believed if we built it, they would come.

Many retail store owners make that mistake. I just watched the same thing happen this last year. A woman opened a what-not shop in the same local mall as the collectibles store Dean had started. The what-not shop, which this poor woman had spent years saving items and money for, was no different than three similar stores that had not survived in that location, and sadly, her store wasn’t as nice as the two other what-not stores that already existed in the same mall.

Anyone with any business experience could have told her the store would fail. She had the wrong location, and she was undercapitalized. She couldn’t wait long enough to build a customer base; she didn’t even have enough money to join a group ad for the mall in the local paper. When the business went under, after less than a year, none of her neighbors were surprised—and none were sympathetic. Everyone mentioned how unrealistic her expectations were, and one other store owner even mentioned the Field of Dreams analogy, albeit in reverse.

“Just because you build it,” he said in his curmudgeonly way, “doesn’t mean anyone will come.”

He was right. It made the loss no less painful for this poor woman. Her dream died in short order. But of all the things she did wrong—and she did quite a few (all first-time business owners and freelancers make horrible mistakes)—the worst thing was the devastation left by her unrealistic expectation.

How can you start a business without expectations? You can’t. You have to have expectations of success or there really is no point in going out on your own. How many people do you know who start a business saying that they believe it will fail?  I’ve never met anyone like that.

But your expectations have to be realistic. The woman shop owner hadn’t done any research. She had planned and dreamed for her store, but she hadn’t researched how to run a business or how much capital she would need. She had assumed these things would come to her.

I dealt with some of this in the section on Goals and Dreams, but expectations are subtler than either of those two things, and they blow up on you when you least expect it.

I had one of those expectation bombs blow up on me this year—and I didn’t even see it coming. My twenty-fourth birthday was terrible. I spent the day alone. My friends had moved out of town, my family forgot my birthday, and my ex-husband didn’t even remember to get me a cake (yes, I know, the handwriting was on the wall at that point).

I spent the day alone, stuck on the farm that we lived above without a car, so I couldn’t even go into town to entertain myself. I read, watched a little television, and generally felt sorry for myself. I also—Scarlett O’Hara-like—vowed I would never have another crappy birthday again, even if I had to make sure the celebrations happened. I promised myself that when I got old and was rich and famous, I would give myself the party of a lifetime. I would pay for all of it—spending tens of thousands of dollars on caterers and airline tickets for all my friends and family—and it would last all weekend, and it would be very, very Dynasty, with designer clothes, rich food, and upscale swanky digs.

Fast forward to January 1, 2010. 2010—the year I turned fifty.

I had a complete and utter meltdown. Not because I turned fifty. But because—apparently—to the 24-year-old me, 50 is really, really old.

The expectation bomb went off. My 24-year old self had planted a huge landmine and as the calendar turned to 2010, I stepped on that damn mine. I realized I don’t have Dynasty-level money. I couldn’t afford to fly my friends and family into some swanky resort somewhere and spend what would have been in 1984 dollars tens of thousands of dollars but what is in 2010 dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars on a party. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around—and if I did, I’d pay off my house and add to my savings, not spend every last dime on designer duds for my shindig.

I knew that. Realistically, I should have shrugged and laughed at my 24-year-old self. But built into that party expectation were two other expectations. The first expectation was that fifty was really, really, really old. I became ancient—at least to that poor lonely girl I had once been. And second—I should be a multimillionaire, maybe even a billionaire, by now. I should have a household name like Stephen King or Nora Roberts or J.K. Rowling.

I don’t.

So—by the lights of the expectation bomb I planted at the ripe old age of 24—I am both old and a failure.

Oh, and happy 50th birthday!

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I’ve run into a million of those personal expectation bombs throughout my career. Some are pretty easy to see—if I sell my first short story, I’ll have it made. If I sell my first novel, I’ll be rich. But others aren’t visible until you step on them (which is why I’m using the term landmine). When I got nominated for my first Edgar award (and typing that phrase is a trip, even now—my first Edgar), I almost declined it but I managed to stop myself just in time.

When Dean asked why I would do such a thing, I heard myself answer, “Because I’m not good enough to be nominated for an Edgar.”  It took some digging to find when I planted that particular landmine. I had planted it (we plant all these expectation landmines) during the summers of my childhood, then continued to grow the mine during my adulthood, by buying novels with Edgar-winner emblazoned on them. I had used “Edgar-winner” as a stamp of quality—and it is a tribute to that award that I was rarely, if ever, disappointed.

Instead of being flattered and honored at first, I was terrified that I had been nominated by accident.

Pieces of that landmine still exist, as you can tell from my parenthetical phrase about my first Edgar award, but now I have that particular bomb under control.

Not all of these landmines are about success. Some are about failure. A pragmatic friend of mine knew the statistics when he started his business. He knew that it took five years to establish most businesses, and since his was particularly tricky, he figured he might not be successful even five years in.

That was his expectation, and his mantra, and he recited it often.

Surprise, surprise: His business got established within two years. He started making a profit. About the time he should have grown the business or made a few changes dictated by his success, he didn’t even notice. Instead, he continued to talk about the three more years he had before his business got established.

No amount of arguing could change his mind; he expected to have a rough first five years. He didn’t notice the success and actively sabotaged it. By not seeing his situation realistically, he lost his business within six years, and declared himself unsurprised.

What surprised him was that as he put the bank books into storage, he realized that he had achieved his success four years previously. He was stunned. He saw his business through the prism of his unrealistic (negative) expectations, and as a result he made mistakes that caused his business to meet those expectations and fail.

How do you root out these unrealistic expectations?

I wish I knew. I’d do a deep personal inventory of my psyche right now and make all of my unrealistic expectations disappear. In fact, I would have done it years ago, so this past January 1 would have been a pleasant day instead of the nightmare it became, all because I tripped over a mental landmine.

In the 26 years since I planted that particular landmine, however, I have learned how to recognize some of those unrealistic expectations and how to prevent them from becoming time bombs.

1. Don’t plant the unrealistic expectation in the first place.

Listen to yourself as you make casual and joking statements. An old friend of mine had a habit that he had to force himself to quit. When a waitress asked, “What would you like?” My friend would say, “I’d like to be rich and never have to work again.”

That’s a very funny statement—particularly in that context (and with the right waitress who also sees the humor)—but it has an unrealistic expectation built into the middle of the joke. “I’d like to be rich and never have to work again.”  Most rich people work. The ones who lose their riches let someone else manage their money. Money management is work. So, if my friend had become rich before he stopped saying this little bon mot, he would have stopped working, too—and probably would have lost all or most of his money to an unscrupulous money manager.

2. Research your expectations.

Has anyone become rich and never had to work again? If so, how?  And if not, why not?  And really—this one was always the key for me when my friend made his little joke—do you want to stop working?  I know a lot of fantastically wealthy people who still work. They work harder than everyone else because they enjoy their jobs.

I’m sure Steven Spielberg could have stopped working somewhere around 1980, but luckily for modern American film he did not. Stephen King could have stopped writing about the same time. As a fan, I’m happy he didn’t.

If I had Dynasty-level money and could have thrown myself that party this year, I would still be working. I love what I do. The money isn’t the reward; it’s a byproduct of being able to do what I love.

3. Research everything.

Before you go into business for yourself, research the industry. Then research money management. Then research business. Listen to the negatives and the positives. If you don’t like what you hear, figure out how you can avoid those problems.

If someone tells you that no one succeeds in your industry (writers hear this all the time), investigate. See if that’s true. See if you can find five people who succeeded in your industry. Then ten. Then twenty.

If someone tells you there’s only one way to succeed, see if that’s true. Usually it isn’t. Ask questions. Find the answers. And don’t take the first answer. Get a second, third, and fourth opinion.

4. Research continually.

Make sure you keep up with your industry. If your freelancing business is in trouble, figure out why. Make the necessary changes to save it. Then make sure you do enough research so that you won’t make that same mistake again.

5. Listen to people who are already successful in your field.

Those people will often offer you advice, but that advice might be oblique. I can’t tell you how many times early in my writing career a very successful writer would say in the middle of a conversation, “That attitude will get you in trouble.”

I would be defensive, or I would ignore the sentence. I’d rarely follow up. But years later, I would remember the comment when that attitude—in the form of an unrealistic expectation—did get me in trouble. And sometimes, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go back to that writer and ask how to repair the damage caused by that expectation landmine.

Nowadays, however, I’m often the writer who says, “That attitude will get you in trouble,” and I watch as writer after writer ignores me. Early on, a writer friend (and former student of mine) was making such an egregious error, based on an unrealistic expectation, that I actually told him point-by-point why he should not take that terrible action. He got angry and defensive and then told me I had no idea what I was talking about.

At that moment, I realized why the sentence “That attitude will get you into trouble,” gets spoken, but no successful person ever follows up on it unless asked to. The newer professional has to want the information and has to be willing to hear the answer.

6. Pay attention to the questions you can’t answer.

These are tough. They’re the kind of questions that, if your parents had asked them when you were a kid, you probably would have answered like this: My friends are doing it. And if your parents were like mine, they’d haul out the old If your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you follow?

You’ll probably have elaborate justifications built up in your mind, and you’ll offer them as answers to the question. But listen to that whisper, which happens just before you offer up the first justification.

For example (and I’m clearly making this up):

Question: Why do you need ten $250,000 cars?

Justification: I collect them.

The Whispered Thought: Rich people own dozens of outrageously expensive cars, and now that I’m rich, I need to act rich.

Each business has those same unrealistic expectations built in. A writer friend of mine rented an office outside the house because (justification) he “needed quiet to work.” Real reason? He believed that people who worked at home were not working, even though he had made 50K a year while working at home. (The office ate up his profits, and he eventually moved back home to save money—and in the process had to ferret out the unreasonable expectation that had caused the problem in the first place.)

An acquaintance of mine graduated from law school in the middle of her class. The law school was the best in her state and in the state’s major city. However, that city was overrun with graduates from the law school, most of whom graduated with a better record than she had. When she couldn’t get a job in any of the city’s law firms (not a one) because her grades were not as good as other applicants, she didn’t move to a different city. Nor did she do some volunteer lawyering or take a job at Legal Aid, like some of my other friends who had not graduated at the top of their class.

Instead, she hung out her own shingle in a town filled with lawyers. She got a few clients—not enough to pay the bills—and because she thought she only needed the law degree, not actually do any hard work, she did a poor job.

Why would this bright woman believe that she could survive in the cutthroat legal atmosphere of the state’s major city with just a law degree?

Her justification was that no law firm hired women like her—which was true in the year she was born. But in the 1990s, when she was trying to do this, law firms hired women all the time.

The whispered unrealistic expectation? Real lawyers worked for a law firm. If no firm would hire her, she had to set up her own firm. She didn’t believe real lawyers worked for Legal Aid or as legislative counsel to a state senator or as in-house attorney at some corporation.

Her law firm—and eventually her dream of being a lawyer—disappeared under the weight of her unrealistic expectation.

7. If people tell you you’re acting irrationally given the evidence around you or events around you, check to see if you’re acting out of an unrealistic expectation.

Think back to my successful friend who refused to believe his business had become successful after two years (when he expected it to take five). From the moment he refused to believe his business was doing better than most, many of his actions were irrational—and people told him so. If he had analyzed the comments and done a little research, he might have saved that business.

But he attributed them all to jealousy or to other motives on the part of the other people. Granted, people will tell you things out of fear or jealousy. That’s why I tell you to research their comments. See if their statements are true. If not, dismiss them. If so, pay attention—and maybe make some changes.

We all have unrealistic expectations about ourselves, our careers, and our birthdays. (Well, maybe I’m the only one with an unrealistic expectation about a birthday.) These unrealistic expectations can ruin our careers—either by giving us the wrong benchmarks (why does anyone need a Dynasty-style party at any age?) or by making us refuse to see what we really have.

You’ll never find all of your unrealistic expectations. But you’ll track down some of the important ones. And if you do, you’ll stop tripping over landmines and start walking forward, which, after all, is how every business progresses. One not-always-smooth step at a time.

Giving Up On Yourself

Amazing the difference eighteen months make. I first wrote the posts entitled “Giving Up On Yourself (Parts One and Two)” in June of 2010. But as we head into 2012, I realize that some of what I wrote is out of date.

I’ve revised this section. The core information is the same but the outdated information is now gone. I initially wrote this section about giving up on yourself by focusing on publishing. But I no longer agree with those parts of the section. I am going to keep the overall structure, talking about artists first. So, the initial introduction is gone, but the important stuff remains.

KKR,

November 2011

First, a disclaimer. The Freelancer’s Survival Guide is for freelancers of all stripes, not just writers, actors, musicians and people who work in the arts. The Guide is for anyone who works for herself.

This topic applies to all of us, but I’m going to start with artists—and by that I mean people who make their living in the arts—before I broaden the scope of the topic.

Artists occupy a rather unique place in the freelance firmament. Unlike most professionals, artists don’t need a formal education. Artists don’t need a license to hang out a shingle. Anyone can declare himself an artist, quit his day job, and try to make a living from his work.

While that’s sometimes freeing, it’s also a danger. Because unlike a doctor who can’t get his license without years of formal training and a certain level of competency, an artist can start “working” the moment she sings her first note or draws her first straight line. In some professions (the securities trade comes to mind), this level of accepted incompetence gives rise to fraud. In the arts, however, the only person who gets cheated when an artist is inexperienced is the artist herself.

Most people who attempt a career in the arts suffer from a mixture of extreme ego and extreme insecurity. We need the extreme ego to attempt success on an international level. After all, what makes our voices different from everyone else’s? There are billions of people on the Earth. Why do we believe that we will stand out?

Ego gives us that belief. But common sense tells us that we will fail at our goal. Worse, we take every mistake to heart. Most artists are sensitive souls, easily wounded by criticism. We believe in ourselves, but not all the time. That insecurity keeps us grounded. It also gives us an Achilles heel.

When the ego and the insecurity are out of balance, the artist tips in the wrong direction. Too much ego and the artist becomes insufferable. A mild-mannered bookstore owner once told me the story of the one and only time he kicked an author out of his store. The author was doing a book signing. A line of customers waited there to get their books autographed. The author was so abusive to his fans, he reduced even the most jaded of them to tears. The bookstore owner stepped in, stopped the signing, and when the author got more belligerent, asked the author to leave. The author refused, the owner threatened to call the police, and the author left in a storm of invective.

That author’s ego was so out of control that he alienated everyone around him. In fact, when the bookstore owner told me who the author was, I was not surprised. I had heard through other sources what a mean, egotistical jerk this man was.

At the time of the signing debacle, the author had several books on the New York Times Bestseller List. Now, no major publishing house will touch him. Why? His ego. His writing is just as good as it always was, maybe better. But no one in a major publishing house—from the publisher to the editor to the sales force—wants to deal with the man. He has alienated everyone in the business.

An out-of-control ego is one side of the imbalance. The other side is rampant insecurity. I can tell you of writer after writer—many of them former students of mine—who write tremendous fiction and can’t sell a word. Why? Because they refuse to let the work leave their offices, believing it no good. A single negative comment will get them to shelve not just that work, but also any other work that might be in the same genre or have the same tone.

I threaten a few of them occasionally, saying I’ll go into their files and mail their stories for them, but, of course, I don’t follow through. Because Dean and I have a philosophy that runs through all of our workshops:

You Are Responsible For Your Own Career

The egomaniacal writer I mentioned above is responsible for the downturn in his career. The insecure writers I mentioned right after him are responsible for the fact that most readers have never heard of them.

Artists must learn to balance that insecurity and ego so that they’re not raving lunatics (except in the privacy of their own offices) and so that they’re not so self-effacing that they refuse to let their brilliant work see the light of day.

Successful artists walk that line every single day. Push any of us hard enough in either direction and you’ll hear a burst of ego or a whisper of insecurity. But neither will last long, and one (the ego) will often result in an immediate apology.

No successful artist has gotten where she is without paying her dues. Paying dues is a long, hard slog, often done in complete solitude. The end result is rather like the end result of going to medical school. You emerge exhausted, different, but with a working knowledge of your field and yourself. You must continue learning from that point on, constantly improving your craft, or you will destroy something (or someone—including, but not limited to, yourself).

When I started in the writing profession, paying dues took a certain amount of courage as well as ego. Most writers did not live anywhere near publishing central, which was (at least for Americans) New York City. We had to convince someone we’d never met to buy our work, and we had to do it via snail mail. Cold-calling an editor was a breach of etiquette. So was dropping into an editor’s office if, indeed, you decided to fly yourself to New York. Writers’ conferences were few and far between.

You had only yourself, your words, and your trusty (but somewhat inaccurate and out-of-date) Writer’s Market. You had to take the flyer.

It took years to run that gauntlet, often with little or no feedback. The writers who survived the constant rejection, the writers who worked at improving each and every day, the writers who persisted against all odds, became the ones whose names you recognize now.

All of the arts had some form of this gauntlet: musicians made demo tapes that had to be mailed to various record studios; artists developed portfolios that had to be mailed to galleries or publishing houses; actors sent resumes and photographs before getting auditions. We didn’t have the benefit of the Internet. We couldn’t build websites that promoted our work, and we couldn’t tell someone to look at our online résumé/portfolio/demo.

I’m excited about the changes digital media will bring to my industry. I already love the way that it has changed the other arts. I can now look at my favorite artists’ portfolios online or listen to music from musicians who don’t get Top 40 airplay. I watch made-for-internet-only video, and I spend too much time looking for the unknown on the web.

But I worry. I watch the Internet providing newer artists with an easy way to give up on themselves.

I see this most strongly in the publishing industry because that’s where I’m tapped in. Instead of a writer enduring years of rejection to get a book published, learning craft, improving, figuring out how to entice a publisher to buy the work (learning the proper use of an agent—which is not as a publisher’s first reader), learning the entire business as she gains experience, writers now make a few attempts and then give up.

Initially, when I wrote this piece, I said that new writers who didn’t try the traditional publishing gauntlet were giving up on themselves. At the time—eighteen months ago—I was on the cusp of being wrong. I hadn’t seen the changes in the industry or if I had seen them, I hadn’t understood them.

Back then—and before—it was easy to see a writer who was giving up on herself. She tossed in the towel, didn’t fight that gauntlet, and just defaulted with publishing online.

Now it could be argued—and I just might do it some day—that writers who refuse to learn how to publish their own work (particularly their backlist, if they’re professional writers) are giving up on themselves. These writers don’t have to do the work themselves, but they should learn how to hire the best help for a flat fee, and then get that work online.

Because, in just the eighteen months since I originally wrote this piece, e-books have become 25% of the book market (and they’ll continue to grow), bookstores have all but vanished except in a few (lucky) places, and most books are ordered online. There is now little that a traditional publisher can do that a writer can’t do herself—provided she’s willing to learn how.

The learning is the key. Because the writer who gives up on himself is the writer who stops learning.

There are a variety of ways to see that unwillingness to learn.

Among professionals, it’s a refusal to look at the changes in the industry and figure out how to apply those changes to the writer’s advantage. The writer remains stuck in the old way of doing things and never even bothers to look at the new way.

Among newcomers, it’s an unwillingness to admit that they still have learning to do in their craft. Maybe their self-published title isn’t selling because it’s unusual. But maybe it’s not selling because readers have sampled it and found it lacking—either in storytelling, grammatical basics, or in just plain old good writing.

The publishing craft might be lacking, as well. The writer might have a great story buried in terrible formatting, hidden behind an awful cover, or hidden behind a bad cover blurb. All of these are skills that a writer can learn or, if he has the funds, he can hire someone to do the work for him for a flat fee.

I keep repeating that flat fee statement because yet another way for writers to give up on themselves is to fail to understand business. Right now, writers can post their work online or do the work to do a trade paper edition, and get up to 70% of the profits. But so many writers are refusing to learn the various ways to do this and retain that 70% profit. Writers can retain the profit either by learning to do the work themselves or paying someone a flat fee to do the work for them.

Too many writers—most of them, in fact—are paying some “professional” as much as 50% of that 70% to do the work for them. Work that will take the “professional” a few hours, and that professional will keep earning a profit on that work for years, maybe even decades.

The difference here is that the writer hasn’t learned business, and refuses to. He’s giving up on himself and in doing so is costing himself thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars over decades.

That frustrates me to no end.

Musicians, who’ve been struggling with this ten years longer than writers, have learned to have multiple platforms. They make sure their music is available in vinyl, CD, and MP3. They license usage rights to radio stations as well as television shows and commercials. They do more concerts than they used to, just to get the music heard. The big recording studios still exist, but they are more selective than ever about the artists they back. The difference is that the artists who have a shot at the bigs and fail to achieve a studio’s numbers now have something to fall back on, and a way to rebuild.

Actors no longer have to choose between stage, screen, and small screen. They work in short video, live-action films, YouTube stories. They work on basic cable and premium channel films. They take television shows, even though that would have been the kiss of death to a movie career twenty years ago, and they do a lot of international work. The markets, in all of the arts, are changing.

But the changing markets shouldn’t be an excuse for failing to try hard. It’s pretty easy to see why an actor isn’t getting work if he posts his latest homemade video on YouTube and it’s filled with too much emoting and not enough emotion. Anyone can spend days watching singers on YouTube attempting to become the next Justin Bieber. Most of those singers are out of tune and have no performance skills at all. It’s hard to become a professional musician. You need a certain level of skill, not just a pleasant voice.

Sadly, it’s the same for writers. You need a certain level of skill to succeed on an international level, and now, the only way to know if you have that skill is to trust the readers. The readers will find your work. If it’s good, it’ll sell—not at huge numbers per month, but a few copies here and there. If the sales remain consistent or grow, you’re doing a good job. If you sell five copies in July of 2012 and only one copy in the next six months, then there might be something wrong with the product.

Should you figure out what that something is? Should you rewrite the book to death? Heck, no. You should practice—keep writing new material, and learn, learn, learn. After a few years, come back to the book that’s not selling. You will see it differently. You will know if the cover is bad or the blurb fails. You’ll know if there is no opening hook.

Provided you’ve been learning and growing and getting better.

All freelancers succeed because they persist. They try, they fail, they learn. They try again, they fail, they learn. They keep trying, keep learning, until they get a glimmer of success. Success rarely comes overnight. It comes after years of hard and often thankless work.

People who go into business for themselves expecting it to be easy are bound to fail, and fail in a spectacular way. Working for yourself is hard. You have a lot of decisions to make, a lot of assessing to do.

How does all of this publishing/artist talk apply to those of you who don’t work in the arts? Simple, really. There are things that you can do for your business that look like get-rich-quick short cuts. You’ve probably tried them. You know that they don’t work.

What works is learning the ropes and becoming the best at what you do.

Sometimes that means going out on a limb with a project no one else believes in. But if it’s early in your career and no one has believed in you yet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that the project is too new or too innovative or too different for other people to appreciate.

Maybe the problem is that you haven’t learned your craft yet. You don’t know how to run the most efficient business possible. You haven’t learned the tricks of your trade.

When you always take the easy route, you’re giving up on yourself. Take that ego of yours and remind it that you need to be the best at what you do. And the best never takes the easy route.

Then take that insecurity of yours and tell it that you need to work harder to get better. It’ll take over from there. And it’ll balance out the ego that seems to think it should be rewarded just for trying.

I know. I know. It’s not always easy versus hard. The answers aren’t always clear-cut. How do you know when you’re giving up on yourself versus being innovative? What if there’s no clear path?

I also know that it’s different for other types of freelancers. The digital world isn’t one-type-fits-all. For example, retail stores with unique inventories are actually hurting themselves if they don’t have a significant online presence. Same with real estate agencies. Doctors are starting to investigate the benefits of e-mail “appointments” for minor matters. Every type of business is different.

So if they’re all different, then how do you figure out where you stand? Are you working hard enough? Are you giving yourself enough credit? Are you hurting or helping yourself?

How do you know if you’re giving up on yourself?

First, recognize that giving up on yourself isn’t black and white. Just because something is easy doesn’t make it wrong. Just because something is hard doesn’t make it right. To know if you’re giving up on yourself, you first have to figure out who you are.

Oh, yeah, that’s simple. Take a lifelong task and figure it out in the next twenty minutes. Not.

What I mean by that is this:

Figure out what your dreams are. Write them down. Figure out what your goals are. Write them down.

Once you’ve figured out what your dreams and goals are today, right now, this instant, honestly assess if you’re on the right road to attaining those dreams and goals. Only you know what your dreams and goals are and whether you’re really on the right path to achieving those dreams and goals.

I stress that only you can figure out if you’re on the right path because sometimes—to an outsider—it looks like you’ve given up on yourself when you really haven’t.

For example, my husband has a degree in architecture and three years of law school. He quit in the last week of his last semester of law school because he realized he did not want to be a lawyer, and if he had graduated from the University of Idaho Law School, he would automatically have had most of the responsibilities of a lawyer, even if he never wanted to practice law.

So, one week before graduation, he became a full-time bartender and school bus driver. To anyone looking at him from the outside, it would seem like he had given up on himself.

Instead, he focused on his writing career. Becoming a full-time professional writer isn’t something you can do overnight. It takes years, and he had just embarked on that career. But think about it from the point of view of his friends and family: he was a thirty-something former professional golfer and professional skier, who had given up “guaranteed” careers in architecture and the law, to what? Spend all his time in bars? Noodle on his computer?

It seemed like he had given up on himself when, for maybe the first time in his life, he had actually started to take himself seriously. Now he’s a bestselling writer, with more than ninety novels published. In hindsight, he made the right—the obvious—decision. But only in hindsight.

What did Dean have that many people do not have? He had a firm belief in himself and a willingness to take risks to achieve his goals. Those risks often made him go against common wisdom, and to fight against the beliefs of others.

That’s tough. But that’s what people with non-traditional professions, freelancers in other words, have to do.

So, how do freelancers know when they’re giving up on themselves?

Here’s where it gets tough, because sometimes (often!) the act of giving up on yourself is by degrees. It’s subtle. It’s settling for a little less than you want. It’s slowly moving off the path until one day you wake up and realize that not only have you left the path you wanted to walk but you’re also not even going in the right direction any more. And you got there by varying your course by half-inches instead of making hard right turns. Sometimes you didn’t even notice as you went off course.

To keep from giving up on yourself, you must:

1. Believe in yourself.

I know, I know. You’re insecure. You’re uncertain. We all are. And sometimes, articulating those big dreams out loud just sounds ridiculous, especially if you haven’t had any achievements in your field yet.

So, how do you gain a belief in yourself when you really have none? I take a tip from the training that actors receive. Pretend. Pretend you have the belief. Act as if you do. Figure out how people who believe in themselves would act in that situation, and then mimic them. Eventually, it will become habit. And somewhere along the way, you will realize that you actually do believe in yourself. To be otherwise would feel odd.

2. Stop the negative self-talk.

If you hear yourself saying, “I’ll never be able to do that,” add “if I don’t try.” Give yourself little pep talks. Keep your focus on what you can control. Remember that your goal is a hard one and will take a lot of effort. So, reward yourself for the small steps.

A corollary to this is: stop talking to/listening to the negative people around you. For every person who thinks something will work, there are five who will tell you the flaws in your plan. First, look at the source. If the person who tells you the flaws hasn’t done anything with his own life, realize that what he’s telling you is what goes on in his head every single day. Those negative words are the ones he lives with and the ones that have prevented him from achieving his dreams. He thinks he’s being helpful. And he is. He’s giving you an example of where you’ll be if you listen to him.

You can cut the negative people out of your life, but that isn’t always productive. I have some marvelous friends who can be very negative about any dreams or goals. I just don’t discuss my future plans with those people. (I often don’t mention my successes to them, either.) I enjoy their company on a casual level, and I keep the relationship on that level.

3. Perform a daily gut check.

Make sure you’re on the right path each and every day. Seriously. Your gut will twist slightly if you’re making a poor decision. That feeling is different from the feeling you get when you make a risky-but-good decision.

Let’s see if I can describe the difference. If you’re making a risky-but-good decision, you’ll feel a bit lightheaded, a bit breathless, and a little frightened. You know it can go wrong, but you’re willing to risk it.

If you’re making a mistake, veering ever so slightly off the road toward your dreams, you might feel lightheaded and frightened, but you’ll also feel just a little sick. Often, if you’re paying attention to that voice inside your head, the one that gives you advice (good and bad), you’ll hear it say, “That’s okay. I’ll be all right. I can live with that.”

4. Watch out for that evil phrase, “I can live with that.”

“I can live with that,” is often accompanied by “for a few weeks, for a year.” But add “forever” to that phrase. Can you live with it now? Can you live with it forever, if you know it means you’ll never achieve your dream?

Sometimes, you have to live with something. Several of my friends have been taking care of their elderly, very sick parents. My friends have volunteered to live with financial hardship and emotional difficulties so long as their parents are alive. My friends also know that this will lead to some deferred goals. But they’re willing to make that choice—and they know, by the very nature of the task they’re facing—that they won’t have to live in this situation for the rest of their lives.

Dean has a great way of analyzing the “I can live with this” part of life. He asks—quite pointedly—“Do you want to be doing this in one year? In five years? In ten?”

If you answer those questions honestly, you’ll know if you’re making too many compromises. For example, I would hate to have to go back and wait tables to finance my writing. But I’d do it, if the writing stopped earning money for me. I’d do it for the rest of my life if it meant I could keep writing.

But I wouldn’t take on another profession. I never could imagine myself being a news director forever or even a journalist forever. Nor could I imagine myself editing magazines and books for the rest of my life.

While those professions seem close to professional fiction writing, they aren’t professional fiction writing. In fact, they get in the way of professional fiction writing.

For a while, I was better known as an editor in the field of science fiction and fantasy than I was as a writer. I was an acclaimed, award-winning editor, and if you look at the circulation figures, the years I edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction were the years of its highest circulation in its entire existence. In other words, I was good at my job. Very good.

I liked the job at first, came to hate it by the end. If I had remained as an editor (and I had dozens of editing job offers after I quit; in fact, I still get editing job offers every now and then), I would have been remembered, acclaimed, famous—and I would have given up on myself. At that point in time, most people believed I was a better editor than writer, and that I was making a huge mistake giving up the editing career.

It was one of the best decisions of my life.

But editing was very seductive. It wasn’t easier than writing for me. It was harder. I had to work for someone else. I had to fit myself into a mold that wasn’t comfortable for me.

However, editing gave me great acclaim and respect. I had achieved, by the age of thirty-five, fame in my chosen genre (science fiction and fantasy) and I was at the pinnacle of my editing career. I could have stayed at that pinnacle for decades, if I had chosen to do so.

It would have been close to a writing career. In fact, it mimicked the writing career in all but the production of stories. I even wrote a lot of words—editorials, interstitial materials, essays. But I didn’t write fiction.

I had been writing fiction since I was seven years old. Giving up on fiction for a career in sf would have been giving up on myself.

And yet, waiting tables—even now—wouldn’t be. Waiting tables would enable me to concentrate on writing during my off hours. I would put in my time for my paycheck, come home, and do what I love. And that’s extremely important to me—more important than being remembered or being the center of a certain genre or being a big shot.

I am a storyteller at heart. And I am happiest when I write down my stories and try to get them published. So long as I do that, I am staying true to myself.

5. Watch out for “good enough.”

I hate that phrase, “Good enough.” The thing that got me to work hardest on my fiction was a comment Frederick Pohl made about my writing at a writing workshop. He said he would have bought a story of mine—not because it was memorable or brilliant, but because he had a 3,000-word gap in his magazine and my 3,000-word story was good enough.

Ack. Kiss of death. I never want to be good enough. I want to be the best.

“Good enough” is settling. And I never want to settle. Not in my fiction (“Oh, my writing is good enough. I don’t have to learn any more.”) Or in my life (“Oh, this job is good enough. I’ll get by.”) “Good enough” is as deadly as “I can live with that.”

Only, “good enough” crops up in other ways. Like this:

• I’m good enough to do something as a hobby, but not good enough to do it as a profession.

• This is good enough to get by.

• I’ll never be good enough to achieve my dream.

All three are deadly thoughts.

Let’s take them one at a time. “I’m good enough to do something as a hobby, but not good enough to do it as a profession.”

That sentence has a whole bunch of levels. First of all, who decides what “good enough” to do something professionally is? And let’s say there are standards; who says you can’t improve? Who says you can’t get better?

Why are you afraid to try?

“This is good enough to get by.” Why are you settling for “getting by”? Why aren’t you striving to do your best?

“I’ll never be good enough to achieve my dream.” Here’s a secret: people who achieve their dreams are never “good enough.” They’re always trying to get better. In fact, they never believe they have reached a plateau. “Good enough” suggests there is one.

And here’s a final one. If you’re constantly satisfied with “good enough” in your field of endeavor, ask yourself this: Are you in the right field? Because if you’re not willing to constantly improve, if you’re willing to settle, then you are not enjoying your work.

There are a bunch of reasons for failing to enjoy your work. You might be burned out. You might be overworked. Or you might not like the work itself.

Many of us have had dreams that have proven wrong for us. I love music, but when it comes to being a musician, I always settle. I never strive. I practice until I’m “good enough” to get by. And no matter what I do, I cannot break myself of this habit.

Which is why my career in the arts is as a writer, not as a musician. I never got to “good enough” as an editor, but I could feel it looming on the horizon. I moved on before “good enough” became part of my editing vocabulary.

This is why I tell you to do a gut check daily. Because you’ll be able to chart the progress of what you do and how you’re feeling. Honestly, it’s okay to discover that a dream you’ve had is not for you.

But here’s what’s not okay: it’s not okay to give up on yourself because you’re not worthy, or someone else has told you the task facing you is impossible.

I have a quote on the bulletin board next to my desk. It’s from Thomas Carlyle: “Every noble work is at first impossible.”

And another from Judy Garland: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, rather than a second-rate version of someone else.”

That’s what we’re talking about here. You need to be a first-rate version of yourself, and only you know who that person is. You’re living your life, not your mother’s life or your best friend’s life. Only you know what you’re capable of.

Don’t do what everyone thinks you should do. Do what you think you should do.

And don’t give up because others tell you you’re not capable of success. Prove them wrong.

6. Be tenacious.

Cling to your dream. Work for your goal. If you step off the path, climb back on the moment you realize you’ve veered in the wrong direction.

You will make mistakes. You will take the wrong path. The key is to come back to yourself, and come back to the right road for you.

I can’t tell you if you’re giving up on yourself. Only you can know that.

Dean has one other question, and it’s a big one: when you’re on your deathbed, what will you regret?

Will you regret not striving hard enough for your dream? Will you regret lost years while you were succeeding in a profession other than the one you love? Will you regret being “good enough?”

Only you can answer those questions.

And you should. Daily. To keep yourself on track.

To keep yourself from giving up.

Staying Positive

I wrote sections of the Guide every week. Mostly, I answered questions or worked off a topic list. But the week I wrote this section, I had been dealing with some issues of my own, mostly to do with my office cat. She had lived alone in my office for more than a decade because she didn’t play well with others (tried, in fact, to kill anything with fur, including raccoons). She had been quite ill, and the week I wrote this, we had finally decided it was time to end her misery.

My office will never be the same.

I took that opportunity to move my office to a new space, where I have three office kitties, and even more privacy than I had before. But it had been an emotional week for me, so I really didn’t want to discuss money.

Instead, I thought I’d answer two questions, both on emotions and freelancing.

The first, from writer Michael Samerdyke, inspired the title of this section. He writes, “Will you include something on how to stay positive?”

Remaining positive sounds like such a minor thing. Yet it is the key to everything. Oddly enough, successful freelancers are the most cynical, hard-bitten optimists in the entire world.

We have to be. Who would believe in us if we didn’t believe in ourselves?

No one discusses remaining positive at a day job, unless it is a requirement of that day job. When I worked as a waitress, I had to smile at the customers and be nice. It was in the job description. The same rules applied, perhaps more stringently, at my very first retail job. We had to be so incredibly nice at that store that we were required (again, as part of the job description) to wish each and every customer a very nice day.

This is not what I mean about positive.

You can grump around your home office for weeks if you want to. You can snarl at the cable news channels, like I often do (particularly during an election cycle).  You can declare a book useless and toss it across the room if you like without worrying about hitting one of your co-workers, since you no longer have any.

You can be the surliest, nastiest person on Earth because you work alone. If being surly and anti-social makes you happy, then by all means, have at it.

When you work alone, you don’t need rules for office behavior. If you don’t receive clients in your office, like most freelancers, then you can behave any way you want to.

Most freelancers don’t take this acting out very far. Mostly, they do a few cosmetic things they would never have done at the day job, like spend the entire day in sweats or in their pajamas. Some don’t shower until they finish work.

Fine. Good. Whatever.

I do dress in Northwest casual to go to my office. I wear the clothes that I would wear to a restaurant or to the post office.  My mother believed that appearances mattered, and that part of my upbringing rubbed off.

In fact, something she said (repeatedly) actually stuck. Dressing properly makes you feel better. And you know something? It does. I don’t wear fancy clothes to the office because that feels ridiculous. But I always feel underdressed and vaguely unhappy when I wear my grubbiest clothes.

Clothing sounds like a side issue, but it’s not. It’s all a part of a greater whole.

A day job gives you structure. It structures your time—when you’ll arrive, when you’ll leave, and what you’ll do while you’re there. It structures your environment—someone else designs your workspace and whether you get an office with a window or a cubicle with high, carpeted walls. It structures your appearance—you may have to wear a business suit or a uniform with the company logo. Some places have strict rules about grooming. Disneyland, for example, won’t allow men to have facial hair. Many restaurants I worked in didn’t allow the wait staff to wear perfume, cologne or use scented soaps because those odors would interfere with the food.

Each day job, whether it’s acknowledged or not, structures the employees’ attitudes. Some, like the retail shops I mentioned above, required positive attitudes at all times. But most emotional structures are subtler than that. Except for discussions of last night’s episode of Lost or some (tame) discussions of this year’s baseball season, personal conversation gets discouraged.

If someone asks, “How are you today?” they really don’t want to know the answer. They don’t want you to launch into a litany of your ills from your aching feet to the hangover that has lingered (been encouraged?) all weekend. In fact, too much personal discussion can lead to reprimand and ultimately dismissal for inappropriate behavior.

You don’t have to be positive at these jobs, but you do have to maintain some sort of professional attitude. You know once you get out of the car in the parking lot that you have to be on your best behavior until it’s time to drive home.

But now, you work at home. Home, where you express every feeling, where you stay when you’re sick, where you go for refuge. Home has suddenly become work, as well, and the lines have blurred.

We allowed those lines to blur long before we went full-time freelance. Before we quit our day jobs, we did our freelance work when we “felt like it” or when we “found the time” or when the muse showed up.

In the early days—for all of us—the freelance work was a side business or a hobby, something we did because we loved it or because it filled the time.

The day job, on the other hand, was something we did for the money.

Now, we freelance for the money. We forget that we used to do this sort of thing for fun. Sometimes full-time freelancing takes all the joy out of the operation.

The key isn’t so much recapturing that joy—remaining joyful day after day isn’t something most humans are capable of—but remembering the joy. Remembering that you are doing the work that you love and you’re lucky to be doing so.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever gave one of my writing students was accidental. He was so serious about his writing that every sentence had become torture. I told him to go play. The advice stuck. He made a sign that said Go Play and put it across from his desk where he could see it every single day.

It didn’t put him in a good mood every day, but it did help him feel better about his freelancing.

Staying positive is tough for a variety of reasons. I mentioned one in the essay on priorities. People who spend the majority of their time alone are prone to depression. Study after study has shown this.

The solutions are simple, but do take time away from the freelancing. Some are basic: Get enough rest, eat good food (not junk food), and exercise. In fact, a recent study showed that a half-hour run has the same effect on a person’s mood that a single dose of Valium has. Plus the run is cheaper and has many other benefits.

You must also schedule time to be with other people, doing fun things. This sounds silly, but many freelancers spend their free time with other freelancers, discussing business. Take the time to see a movie or to go to the beach or take in a basketball game.

People whose freelancing requires little more than a computer and a wi-fi connection can go to restaurants, libraries, and other places to get some work done. One Christian writer I know spends every afternoon in a local restaurant, researching, writing, and going over his manuscripts. He eats lunch, pays a little extra for his coffee, and socializes just enough to keep his mood elevated.

It works for him. Sometimes, that solution works for me, too.

But the toughest part about staying positive has nothing to do with the lack of companionship or the right attitude. It takes focus to remain optimistic.

First, you need confidence in your work. Most of us don’t have it. If pushed, we confess to all kinds of insecurities, problems, reasons why our work isn’t as good as it could possibly be.

Yet we need to believe in ourselves to do a good job.

What do I recommend?  Act like you have the confidence. Eventually, you’ll improve in this area.  I learned this through theater training. Traditional acting schools teach that if you mimic an emotion, you can actually bring that emotion out in yourself.

Think about that for a moment: Before you started freelancing full-time, you probably described your emotional life as pretty balanced. It had to be. You had to maintain a professional decorum at your day job.

Then you quit that day job, spent all your time at home, and your emotions started running amuck. You didn’t have to pretend any more. You could be yourself—and yourself, like the rest of ourselves, is an emotional rollercoaster.

That rollercoaster is fine—and often good for those of us in the arts—but you have to be aware you’re riding it. You need to assume that mask of professional decorum when dealing with the outside world. You need to filter all the information from the outside world through the same professional mask.

If a new client doesn’t return a phone call on time, it’s not because the client hates you. It’s because the client didn’t have time to get to the phone that day or forgot or something equally silly. But we lose track of that when we work at home, for ourselves, with no one to balance us.

Work to retain your optimism. You quit your day job because you believed you could succeed as a freelancer. You need to remember that each and every day. If that means putting a sign up in your office that says Believe in yourself!, then do it. Who’ll see the little aphorisms you post around your desk?  You’re not in someone else’s building any more. Your office is private, so design it in a way that keeps you motivated and happy.

That includes things like music. Or an excellent view. Or a great screen saver. (I have one that makes me smile, no matter what.) I keep a cartoon-a-day calendar, and read it every day, which also helps, believe it or not.

But the most important part of staying positive is to remain realistic. If forty-five people say something nice to us and one person says something mean, we’ll remember the something mean and discount the nice things.

As freelancers, we have to keep track of the good and the bad. And we have to give them the proper weight. Teaching reminds me how to weigh the things around me. As I explain things to my writing students, I realize the things I’ve overlooked in my own life.

However, I do work hard to remain realistic. My first and best tool for this is my calendar. I have a New Yorker desk calendar, encased in leather and embossed with my name, at my right hand, just past my computer’s mouse.

I write every single good thing that happens to me in a day on that calendar. I keep track of fan mail, covers, publications, awards, and the amount of money I receive.

I think getting paid for my work is a good and positive thing. Rather than relegate it all to the accounting program, I also keep track in my calendar.

I also keep track of good comments, even from people who have rejected my work.

People who work for themselves have trouble keeping track of time. First-time freelancers soon learn that they can’t tell Thursday from Tuesday without help. Even if you take the weekends off, the weekdays seem remarkably the same.

The good things that happen to you will seem far in the distance, even if they happened a week ago. The bad things, conversely, will seem like they happen every day, even if the last one happened a month before. Remember that we focus on the bad and often forget the good.

So, on bad days, I go back through my calendar and look at all the good things that have happened. It helps me maintain perspective.

I do realize that some professions don’t have the regular positive feedback that my job does. Some people work for years on the same project, or they do healing work (like massage or psychotherapy) that often has no real end to it, or they work in professions with no real feedback at all.

How do you stay positive in jobs like that?

The same way you remain positive when you’re just starting your business and have no real sticks to measure success with.

You have to learn how to measure success from within, not from the outside. In other words, set daily goals and reward yourself for achieving them.

The daily goals must be realistic. They can’t be too easy or you’ll finish in an hour and feel like you haven’t worked. On the other hand, they can’t be too hard or you’ll never achieve them and will always feel discouraged. You must set a goal that makes you put in some effort and gives you a good result at the same time.

Writers generally set a word limit—writing so many words of new material each and every day. Musicians often set a time limit—practicing for so many hours each and every day. EBay sellers will often set a goal of making a certain number of listings each and every day.

The type of goal will vary from business to business, but it must be something that you can achieve daily. I also set weekly goals and monthly goals. Even though I’m very structured, I usually miss my monthly goals—something gets in the way or goes long or (as in this week) life intrudes a bit and puts me behind.

Sometimes I miss my weekly goals as well due to illness or some other interruption. But I rarely miss my daily goals, and I still reward myself for achieving them. The rewards are small—an extra hour of television that night or a brand-new paperback book or just a simple pat on the back. I mark that success in my calendar, so that I can look back on bad days and say, “Well, at least I achieved my goals in the past week.”

Sometimes, that’s all I need.

The other aspect to being realistic is to know your limitations. During the same week that Michael Samerdyke asked his question, Laura Ware asked something similar. Laura, a Florida columnist and freelance fiction writer, has had life intrude on her work in a very big way.

She has become the full-time caretaker for her very ill elderly in-laws. With the help of her family and an occasional visit from home health care services, she tends to her in-laws seven days per week. But Laura is determined to continue with her freelance work in the middle of all of this.

She asks, “When you’re in the kind of place [that I’m in], how do you know what’s slacking, what’s too much, and what’s appropriate?”

That’s a very healthy question. Because if you set your goals too high, you’ll feel bad. People whose lives have intruded on their work (not just freelancers, but everyone) suffer a lot of stress. Whether taking care of elderly parents or taking care of a newborn baby, things happen in all of our lives that cause stress and an additional burden (even if, in the case of the baby, it’s a burden that we want).

What we have to do is, again, be realistic. If you’re the sole breadwinner for your family, you can’t drastically cut back your hours. You may have to hire outside help or work with other family members so that they can share some of the burden.

But if you’re not yet a major breadwinner, if part of the condition that the family imposed on you quitting your day job was to be the stay-at-home parent or to take care of the elderly parents or, in the case of a friend of mine, to be the sole caretaker of a dying spouse, then you must shave your work goals accordingly.

You need to figure out when you can steal the hours to get work done and if you’ll be in any shape to do the work when those hours happen. If you’re under a great deal of stress, like Laura is, cutting back on sleep is a terrible idea. If you’re just overwhelmed with car pooling and running errands, you might have to change your work habits by figuring out what parts of your job you can do on the run.

In Laura’s e-mail, she adds this, “I’m tapping this out on my phone while sitting in a waiting room with my mother-in-law (she has a doctor’s appointment). After I send this, I’ll fire up my laptop and try to get something done while I sit around.”

Laura is one of the hardest workers I know. She gets a lot done while caring for her family. She’s organized and driven, and unwilling to give up her dreams, even though she’s in a tough spot right now. She routinely writes five hundred words per day, which is a great deal given her situation.

Yet as her question says, she feels like she’s not doing enough.

So, let’s take the question bit by bit: How do you know what’s slacking?

I think we all know deep down when we’re not working hard enough. If we’re spending most of our time watching television or playing video games, we’re not working hard enough. Some people compare themselves to other freelancers and think, I should be working as hard as they are. That’s not the answer either, because everyone is in a different circumstance.

Know your circumstance, know what you’re capable of, and then make a realistic assessment of your life. Try to achieve your new daily goal for a week. If you never reach the goal, figure out if the problem is that you weren’t putting in enough time, that you didn’t have enough time to give (as in Laura’s case), or if the goal is just too hard to achieve in a single day for you.

Then, set a new goal and try that for a week. Work until you find one you have to stretch just a little to achieve, but make sure it is one you can achieve. When you’re ill or taking care of something in your life that takes precedence (like sickly elderly parents), then you might have to cut back on your daily goals. When you’re in excellent physical shape with no distractions in your life, raise your goals. Don’t set anything in concrete. Be flexible but realistic.

If you can achieve your daily goal in fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the day goofing off, you’re slacking. In this case, you need to measure how much leisure time you have. If you’re spending too much time recreating, and not enough creating, you’re slacking.

The next part of her question: What’s too much?

If you have no leisure time, if you’re getting repetitive stress injuries, if the people around you whom you trust start telling you forcefully that you need time off, then you are working too much. In the last two years of our publishing company, our friends started handing Dean articles on stress management. He was putting in 20 hours per day, seven days per week, and it showed. Eventually he collapsed, and no one was surprised, except him.

He’s learned how to moderate, although he doesn’t like it much. I’ve learned that he still works harder than anyone else I know. But now he’s working a more sensible schedule (10-12 hours per day, with one weekday evening and one full day per week off), and getting 8 hours of sleep per night. He occasionally thinks he’s slacking, but no one gives him articles on stress management any more.

And the final part of Laura’s question: What’s appropriate?

Appropriate is an interesting word, because it implies that there are Standards To Be Met.

The cool thing about being a freelancer is that you set your own standards. What’s appropriate for me, a person with few responsibilities and a long-term career with several obligations, isn’t appropriate for Laura or for anyone else reading this.

So, let’s rephrase the question in a way that Goldilocks and the Three Bears would understand: What’s just right?

Just right changes. Just right may be 500 words per day because you’re taking five minutes here and five minutes there. Just right might be 5,000 words per day because you have no other obligations or 8,000 words per day because you waited too long to start that book under deadline.

For a therapist friend of mine, four days of client meetings per week was just right. It kept her fresh for her patients. She was able to maintain her emotional balance at four days, with three-day weekends to recharge. She figured out how many patients she could reasonably handle, how many she could help, and how many would drain her. And she picked the answer that allowed her to remain healthy and to do the work that helped the clients that she had.

Once you’ve figured out what’s just right for you, then make a note of it. Set it up as a goal to be reassessed when the current situation changes. Then strive to meet that goal every single day.

And reward yourself for doing so.

Early on in your freelance career, the only good things will be subtle ones—meeting your daily goal and enjoying the work that you quit your day job to do.

The best way to remain positive is to remind yourself that you’re now doing the work you love, day in and day out. Most people aren’t that lucky. Most people never get the chance to do what they love.

You have taken that opportunity.

Enjoy it, and value it for what it is—something special. Something worthwhile.

An achievement, in and of itself.

Reaching For Your Dreams

Sometimes I have to wonder if I was a history major and am a science fiction writer because I see patterns in what Thomas Jefferson called “the course of human events” or if I see patterns because I had training in both history and science fiction. I suppose that’s one of those unanswerable questions. But the one thing that is clear is that my mind doesn’t work like other people’s.

Let us pause for the expected chorus of “well, duh.”

Now that the chorus has passed, let me explain why I started with that blanket statement.

I am a news junkie. I consider the news—however it gets consumed—an essential part of freelancing. Most people who pay attention to the news and stay informed get a sense of what’s going on, what to expect, and why to expect it.

But they simply don’t get a “course of human events” overview. Not everyone thinks that way.

So…here are the factors that have gone into my thinking when I wrote this section. An article in the Washington Post on November 11, 2009, about a college graduate whose “bright future” was torn away from her by the recession. The housing statistics that came out this week, which revealed that one in four American homeowners with a mortgage are underwater (meaning they owe more—much more—than the house is worth). For many who choose to (or can) stay in their homes, the houses will not regain their lost worth for another 15 years. (CBS News EconWatch blog, November 24, 2009)

That same week, the Federal Reserve predicted that the high unemployment rate would continue through 2010. Estimates vary, but the rate hovers around 10.2 percent. That 10.2 percent does not include the underemployed—people who want to work full time but can only find part-time work. If those people get included, then the rate of un- and underemployed goes to more than 17 percent. (Turns out the Fed prediction, which I found on Marketwatch.com on November 24, 2009, was right.)

Those statistics—the 25% of all Americans with a mortgage, combined with the more than 17% un- and underemployment created a perfect storm to make things worse. Because people who received a job offer out-of-state could not afford to sell their house in order to move.

Think about it. They would sell their home at a loss, then be on the hook for the difference between their mortgage and the sale price. In other words, they might sell their home and be in debt for $100,000 or more.

This led one analyst to claim that people in that situation would be better off walking away from their underwater mortgages. Better to damage your credit rating, Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Enterprises told CBS News, than it would be to continue to throw money down a black hole.

All of this came on the heels of a study that showed the herd mentality is hardwired into human beings. (PBS.org, November 11, 2009) We feel better if we do what other people are doing—even if we know it’s wrong or does not benefit us at all.

It takes more than chutzpah to go against conventional wisdom. It takes courage and perhaps a slightly screwed-up internal wiring. Which explains even more about me.

(And there it is again: the “well, duh,” chorus. We wait for the sound to pass and now continue…)

So, what does this all mean to the historian/science fiction writer in me? A lot, actually. We are in the middle of more than the Great Recession. We’re in the middle of a generational shift. And even more than that, we’re in one of those sweeping moments of cultural change.

Dean and I discussed it a bit before I wrote this section. The credit rating—which only matters if you’re going to borrow money—will lose (and perhaps already has lost) its godlike status in the American mind. So many people did things to preserve their credit ratings. For a long time, Dean and I watched in confusion because, as freelancer writers, we realized that credit ratings had no meaning for us. Then, employers started using credit ratings as they hired people (!), and insurance companies started basing rates on credit ratings (!), and businesses stopped taking cash, requiring plastic (!) preferring credit to debit cards and…and…and…we acquiesced to the culture and actually did some work to make sure we had a credit rating, too.

Now, most people have no credit rating. Wealthy people are cutting loose second and third homes, homes that have devalued so much as to be worthless to them—thinking, like the analyst said, what’s the point of pouring money into a black hole when the money could (and probably should) go elsewhere. Formerly middle class people without work are trying very hard to put food on the table, credit rating be damned. And landlords no longer use credit ratings to judge the applications for rentals because they have to keep the units filled to pay the mortgage on their (probably underwater) commercial property.

And on, and on, and on.

The credit rating is but one shift. There is also the shift in attitude toward housing. The conventional wisdom will shift from turning houses over to this: If you’re going to be in an area for only a few years, you’ll rent rather than buy. If you expect to stay somewhere permanently, you’ll buy, but your house won’t be an ATM. Your house may increase in value or it may decrease in value, but it will be the place where you live. And (oh my!) paying off the house will probably become a lot more important than getting your mortgage interest deduction.

How does all of this relate to freelancing? And how does it relate to the girl interviewed in the Washington Post, the girl who lost her “bright future”? And the herd mentality?

I’ve bemoaned an attitude that I saw in generations who were born or came of age after 1980. I knew this was a generational thing; I also realized that they would eventually understand How The World Really Works. (She writes, sounding like the old fart that she is.) But it wasn’t me hoping they’ll get their comeuppance, although I did worry what would happen when they finally did realize that the world is an uncertain place. It was me, trying to understand where the attitude came from, and what exactly was going on.

I didn’t realize that I had part of the attitude myself until I read the article in the Washington Post. I didn’t add the link because the article is unremarkable. But this story put things in perspective for me because it spoke to my upbringing. Like me, this girl was raised in a family that believed in higher education. And like my family, hers believed that the better the school, the better the opportunities.

Where our families diverged was only in generational experience. My father, the first person in the American branch of his family to go to college, graduated in the Depression. (That his parents could afford college in the Depression has recently helped me understand why my mother thought them wealthy. By the standards of the day—with my grandfather’s regular job as a rural mail carrier, which brought in a good salary—my grandparents were well off. It wasn’t just because my mother had survived on radish sandwiches and lived in the attic of a boarding house; it was because my paternal grandparents could provide my father [and later, my aunt] with opportunities most families couldn’t fathom at the time.) Graduating in the Depression with a college degree opened some doors, but not others. Jobs weren’t guaranteed.

Nor were they guaranteed when I graduated from college. Not that I graduated with honors from an Ivy League school. I graduated from a very good state school with an A- GPA in an area (history) that realistically held no opportunity for employment for someone with a bachelor’s degree.

So when I read in the Washington Post article that the guaranteed $200,000 jobs for college graduates with business degrees had dried up in the last few years, I just about choked on my breakfast. Excuse me? Guaranteed $200,000 jobs? Granted, the article was talking about guaranteed jobs for the A-list graduates of a top school, but still. Guaranteed?

Later in the week, I heard another choking statistic: that recent college graduates would have to settle for jobs that paid an average of $50,000. Where the heck would they find those jobs? And wouldn’t they be crowded out of the position by unemployed people my age?

The news has been filled lately with the plight of recent college graduates. Business has finally come to its senses. With a proliferation of candidates—one company that needed 100 workers recently saw 2,000 applicants show up in one day—business are hiring the people with experience, people with families, and a commitment to the community. They’re not hiring a hotshot straight out of the Ivy League who needs to learn how the business world works.

And they’re not hiring every experienced person either—as many of you well know. It takes hundreds of submitted resumes just to get an interview, and it might take hundreds of interviews to get a job.

Like so many recent college grads, the girl in the article has stopped submitting resumes in her chosen field. Instead, she’s thinking of working odd jobs, traveling, and doing what my husband’s generation called “finding herself.” She has been walking down a path carved out for her from childhood and has finally realized that she needs to look at other paths to see which one suits her.

All well and good. Everyone experiences that at one point or another. As I read the article, I saw opportunity. Her parents saw disaster and a “wasted” education, one they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on with the certainty that it would bring their child success after graduation. They blame the fact that the education isn’t paying off on her for failing to submit resumes, not on the sea change that is happening around all of us.

And that’s what caught me about this article, as opposed to all the other articles about all the other college students for whom the promise of a bright future has not yet been fulfilled. It was the parents’ expectation that if they did A, B, and C, and their daughter did as she was told, that it would all pay off in the end.

I am of this girl’s parents’ generation. And while I have always believed that marching to your own drummer was the best way to go, I’ve seen that as an aberrant attitude, not as a sensible one. I’ve been a bit apologetic for my attitude, a bit militant about it, citing my rebellious nature.

What I didn’t see is how an attitude that had come from a wealthy post-war period had become engrained into all of us growing up after World War II. That period of relative stability led to choices and attitudes—even in the deep recession of the 1970s—that became hardwired into everyone in the Baby Boomer Generation. Those attitudes became expectations for our children—of course we’re all going to be richer, more successful, and smarter than our parents! We have better opportunities.

Those of us who turned our backs on those opportunities—on the accepted path—were considered odd. And if we didn’t succeed, it was our attitude that caused us to fail or so the accepted wisdom went. Those of us who did succeed did so because we were “lucky” or “talented” or “special”—not because we took risks that paid off.

Now, we’re watching an entire generation come of age for whom the rules have failed. Some of these kids will become bitter young, as the promises that they heard when they were growing up didn’t get fulfilled. And some will succeed on that path they were hardwired to march along.

But the rest, the rest have an opportunity that previous generations didn’t have.

The rest don’t have to postpone their dreams.

They can follow their dreams because they have nothing to lose. They’ve already lost the “expected,” “certain” path.

We might be approaching a great period of creativity and innovation in American life, creativity and innovation that wasn’t born of solid steady work but of necessary risk to survive.

Because for the first time in at least fifty years, maybe more, we have a generation coming of age that has the opportunity to create their own path. The adults around them are struggling too hard to survive themselves to put the brakes on the younger generation. And any clear-eyed adult realizes that the opportunities for the inexperienced worker have dried up, no matter what their pedigree.

People born in the 1980s now have a chance to take extreme risks, to fail spectacularly and maybe, to succeed spectacularly. Because risk, for them, is different.

The Baby Boomers married in their early 20s, had children, and settled on a career that they thought would sustain them for life. Yes, there were the rebels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they were seen as outliers—as outsiders, in many ways—and for many of them their hippie/protest days were just a phase.

By the time Baby Boomers realized they weren’t doing what they wanted to do, that they were running out of time to make a real difference in the world, to follow their passion, they had a family, a mortgage, regular bills, and a job they were afraid to sacrifice. All that work, all those promotions. They had guaranteed retirement, and they would write or paint or start a small business after the age of 65.

A lot of those Baby Boomers are coming to our writing classes now. These people are retired and they have the time, and many of them have the beginnings of a career—several story sales, a novel sale, maybe more—but they’re embarking on a career that can take ten years to ramp up.

In the ten years since Dean and I did our first workshop, two of our students have died—an older man who waited until retirement to start writing, and a driven middle-aged man who had a nonfiction career and wanted to make a living at fiction. He never achieved the “make a living” part, although he sure published a lot of fiction in his last few years.

I’ve watched others who have postponed their dreams struggle with years of learned behavior—deference to authority, an unwillingness to rock the boat, an inability to operate outside of a corporate structure. When you get older, you feel the end of your life looming. That feeling of immortality that you had as a teenager is a long-ago memory. The feeling that anything is possible that you had in your twenties is gone. As a middle-aged adult, you know that some things are no longer possible. (As I said to one of my students: I now know I will never play professional basketball, no matter how much I want to. She laughed, but understood. Even if I had Michael Jordan’s skills, I’d still be fifty—an age that no one (yet) plays professional basketball).

Postponing your dreams is a dangerous thing to do. Because time does eventually run out. In order to freelance, you need to learn how to take risks, and if you spent a lifetime on the accepted path, risks become something to avoid. Yet freelancers can’t survive without it.

When you postpone your dreams, you take a risk that you’ll live long enough to pursue them and to have success. What most people who postpone their dreams fail to realize is that when they retire, they might have the time to work on their dreams full time, but they might not have the time to achieve them.

There’s more to freelancing than the skill that brought you to the table. You must learn how to manage money, how to run your own business, how to survive failure, and how to turn that failure into a success. All of that takes time. And time is the one commodity that we have that we can’t count on. We really don’t know if we’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow. And we shouldn’t bank on surviving that bus accident if it happens.

Right now, the economy is providing millions of people with the opportunity to take their destinies into their own hands. So many people postponed their dreams because they felt they had something to lose. If they quit their job, they could lose their house, their credit rating, the respect of their neighbors. They could force their family into poverty, lose their health insurance, and risk the fortunes of everyone they love, not just their own fortunes.

All of those things are excellent considerations. So many people had to postpone their dreams. One friend of mine got pregnant in high school and spent twenty years raising children, barely eking out a living as a single mom. She postponed her dreams out of necessity, and as soon as the kids moved out of the house, she pursued those dreams with great purpose—and is having great success.

Like her, many of you had no choice. You had to postpone.

But the world has changed. Attitudes have changed and will remain changed for decades to come. The credit rating will no longer be so important. No one cares who pays their bills because everyone is struggling right now.

And if you’ve lost your job, you’ve already lost your steady income. You’re probably juggling bills, trying to survive. Continue to send out resumes, but as you do, consider following your dreams. Because all those things you would have jeopardized ten years ago, when the economy seemed stable, are already in jeopardy.

In other words, you may have very little to lose by trying. And that’s an opportunity just waiting to happen.

This section, though, is also aimed at newly minted college grads who have just realized that they were walking a path that now has a giant roadblock running across it. The easy road is gone. Those $200,000 jobs for you business graduates from Ivy League schools evaporated with the Wall Street meltdown.

Time to look around, to see if the road you’re walking is really the one you want to be on. Even if the roadblock goes away, do you want to be a corporate executive? Do you want to work for someone else for the rest of your life? Do you dream of being a musician or a bookstore owner?

Now is the time to start. The economic collapse has instituted a sea change. People who’ve just graduated from college are in the same boat I was in when I graduated. I never expected to own a home (and I figured that if by some odd chance I bought one, I’d live in it for the rest of my life, so I had best be certain that was the house I wanted). I figured I would move from job to job because careers were hard to come by, especially for college grads. I started writing because I liked it—and I had nothing to lose by trying.

Whenever I use that phrase “nothing to lose,” I hear the voice of my husband. Dean and I met at a writers’ workshop in Taos, New Mexico, in 1986. After the workshop, we both went home—me to Wisconsin, and Dean to Idaho. Within the week, he was driving to Wisconsin to be with me.

I asked him why. We loved each other and had planned to get together in August, after we had settled everything in our lives. We weren’t sure where we would be, but we figured we’d work it out by then.

But he went back to Idaho, to the small apartment he had moved into after he had separated from his wife, to the bartending job he had put on hold to go to the writers’ workshop, and realized that nothing held him in that small town.

He said to me on the phone from some rest stop somewhere between Idaho and Wisconsin, “I’m coming to you because I have nothing to lose—”

As he said that phrase, I remember thinking, That’s worrisome. He’s not coming toward something; he’s coming because he has nothing else. I heard that phrase through the filter of my upbringing: that a person with nothing to lose has failed somehow.

Then he added the important part of the sentence. It wasn’t an afterthought for him. It was the central part of his message.

“—and,” he said, “I have everything to gain.”

He had weighed the risks against the rewards and realized he was taking no risk at all. He had no risk except the drive itself and a possible rejection by me. (Yeah, right. Like that would have happened. Not.) He had—we had—everything to gain from his willingness to start our relationship immediately.

And twenty-four years later, it's clear he was right. We have gained a great deal because he was savvy enough to realize that he was in the position to do something he wouldn’t normally have been able to do.

So many of you are in that position now. Sometimes life forces us to postpone our dreams. Sometimes we postpone them out of fear.

Right now, life—and the economy—is giving millions of us nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

If we only try.

Try.

Your life will be richer if you do.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.

Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award.

She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.

She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits some of the volumes, as well.

To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

@KristineRusch

KristineKathrynRuschWriter

www.kriswrites.com

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Freelancer’s Survival Guide

Short Books

When to Quit Your Day Job

Getting Started

Turning Setbacks into Opportunity

Goals and Dreams

How to Negotiate Anything

The Secrets of Success

How to Make Money

Networking in Person and Online

Time Management

WMG Writer’s Guides

Closing the Deal on Your Terms

Writing a Novel in Seven Days: A Hands-on Example

Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing

How to Write Fiction Sales Copy

Stages of a Fiction Writer

Writing Into the Dark: How To Write a Novel Without an Outline

The Write Attitude

Discoverability: Help Readers Find You in Today’s World of Publishing

Killing the Top 10 Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing

How to Write a Novel in Ten Days

Killing the Top 10 Sacred Cows of Publishing

Surviving the Transition: How Writers Can Thrive in the New World of Publishing

The Pursuit of Perfection and How It Harms Writers

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Layout and design © copyright 2017 WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

Cover art © copyright Leo Blanchette/Dreamstime

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