Readers!
As of today, my freelance writing career is 21 years old. It can drink and buy tobacco in all 50 states. Good for her. Or me! Mostly me. I will be celebrating with a ginger ale.
In honor of this day, I went back and did a graph of my freelance income over time (minus the first year because my record keeping skills weren’t great then).
PHEW.
I look at this and can see my life. I bumbled around at the start, gained some footing, then got smacked by the Great Recession. I made a comeback and then…well. That big dip there in 2016? It’s when my last book came out. I spent so much time promoting it in the hopes that it would sell well enough to get me another book deal that I didn’t do as much paying work. That did not work out. Deep sigh. I did all I could. I’ll probably have more to say on the 10th anniversary of its publication.
But there’s more to the story than that. In what should have been a year of celebration at reaching a career milestone, I was also dealing with the neighbor from hell. We lived in attached row homes, and her negligence in taking care of hers ripped holes open into mine, causing $15,000 in damage, after which her daddy lawyer threatened to sue me for daring to ask the town for help. And they only knew I asked for help because the then-mayor of the town who I clashed with a few times (and who is currently embroiled in yet another controversy that sure seems related to being forced to listen to a woman) forwarded my emails asking for help to her daddy lawyer. Because they were pals.
How dare I want it to stop raining inside my home! (Is that the first time I’ve said what really happened? Maybe! And that’s only the half of it!)
Anyway, my income dropped further because 2017 started with continual harassment from nightmare neighbor, followed by my first dog dying, and me being forced to sell said house to get away from her. I packed up my Jeep and got the fuck out of town with the goal of seeing the 18 states I hadn’t been to yet. It was adventure of a lifetime, but I only did it because I didn’t know where else to go. The logistics of working on the road were difficult enough, but I didn’t have much interest in working at all because I was also deeply depressed. My income dropped to almost half of what it was two years before.
So then what happened to bring me back out? Therapy! And my freelance angel Jennifer Goforth Gregory reached out and said “we can fix this.” That’s when the chart starts to go back up, and I wrote about what I did in my first ebook, How I Made $135,000 in One Year of Freelancing. The year 2019 was my best freelancing year ever, and I’ve been frolicking around in the six-figure freelancer meadow ever since.
She taught me that I need to be strategic about my freelance writing career, and also that marketing to make sure work is always coming in means that I won’t have to worry so much about money and can also jettison clients who are not a good fit for me. I have been passing along a lot of these lessons in my coaching sessions because even though that experience happened years ago, the tenets have stayed true. If you’re always marketing, then you’re always putting your name out there for work. Someone, at some point, is going to write back back.
I also realized in one of the coaching sessions I gave that perhaps my income peaked in in 2019 because I was willing to do just about anything (WRITING WISE) for money, to see what new-to-me things I could do to rescue my business. Once I reached a comfortable income level, I stopped taking work I didn’t want to do anymore, and replacing it wasn’t such a critical need. If making $8,000 less from 2024 to 2025 meant that instead of slogging through scut work I didn’t enjoy, I was running around Italy or going down the shore or taking naps, then that was well worth it.
So happy 21st birthday, this weird and wild career I’ve had. Here’s to 21 more (and then retirement. If I want to. Because as much as a pain in the butt this work can be, I enjoy most of it).
Before I get to the usual stuff: I’m off next week so there won’t be a newsletter. I will be TOO BUSY in a place that is warmer than it is here (and if you’d like you can follow along here). So see you in February!
Recent Bylines
“Trump executive order on AI: praise and confusion for medical device manufacturers,” AAMI News
What I’m Reading
- Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. A family of Lagos women is said to be cursed, including a pair of cousins. One gives birth the day of the other’s funeral, to a daughter who is treated like her reincarnation. The story slips back and forth in time, but that one — am I my own person? — anchors it. I liked it, much as I did Braithwaite’s 2019 novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer.
- Last Twilight in Paris by Pam Jenoff. I pick up books by this author for two reasons. First, she’s a local author and does a lot to support our independent bookstore (and I found out she had a new book out from their Instagram page). And second, because her books are always aggressively fine. I know what I’m going to get. This one is primarily about two women: Louise, a British housewife who volunteered with the Red Cross during World War II, and Helaine, a French Jewish woman who was interned within the city; and how their stories intertwine as told from both 1943 and 1953. It’s OK as melodrama but also one where I learned about Lévitan, a home goods store turned work camp whereimprisoned 800 Jewish people were imprisoned within Paris — people who were then forced to sort through items looted from Jewish peoples’ homes, and sell them to Germans. I had never heard of this, and I’m glad I learned about it as I prepare for my spring trip to France.
What I’m Watching
- A Haunting in Venice. The good about this interpretation of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party: Venice looks gorgeously creepy and works as a replacement for the English country manner of the original; and Jamie Dornan is great in this. The bad: Kenneth Branagh is a generational talent, when he is not directing himself. I say this as someone who sat through his five-hour Hamlet, and paid a lot of money to see him do King Lear on the West End. I get why he wants to do his own take on Detective Poirot, but he’s at his best when someone else keeps him in check. And this all looks especially off when we have Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out movies running around our screens. (I’m going to gander that his Much Ado About Nothing being an exception has an awful lot to do with the involvement of his wife at the time, Emma Thompson WHO HE THEN CHEATED ON, but she got Greg Wise. Good for her. Ahem.)
- Nobody. In the dearly missed Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period podcast, they gave Denzel Washington’s career eras. One was Old Man Action Era, which has become a right of passage for some actors. This is Bob Odenkirk’s entree into the genre, and I can’t say I hated it. He plays a middle aged guy living a stable but boring life in the suburbs, but he clearly has some kind of past. He’s sprung back into action after a home invasion (a thing that really happened to Odenkirk, which he said inspired the idea). I like that his character isn’t some super soldier, and clearly feels his age (he’s good but he also gets pretty beat up in his first fight back). Also, great role for Christopher Lloyd as his father.
- Lost Tombs of Notre Dame. I went to Paris for the first time in 2023, when Notre Dame was still closed for renovations after the 2019 fire. I’m scheduled to go back in April, and yes of course I am going to see since it’s re-opened. Turns out they found a lot of stuff during the renovation! This is about that, and well worth your time.
- Sky Captain and World of Tomorrow. This 2004 movie starts out in a retro 1939 New York City, one more advanced than our time. And it becomes a fantastical adventure that was one of the first dabbles with a CGI-forward film. It’s weird, and I didn’t quite know what’s going on, but enjoyed it? It flopped, even with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow as leads, but as become a bit of a cult classic. It was an interesting take at something new, and reminded me a lot of Cool World in that way, though really it just made me want to watch The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger.
- Central Intelligence. This is a 2016 Kevin Hart/The Rock entry into the “buddy cop” action movie and ehhhh. It has bad fat jokes and is cheesy but not cheesy enough in the way that makes The Other Guys a better kind of movie in this realm. But it’s fine. I picked this up at the library and said “sure why not” knowing it would be great. It’s the kind of movie I’d see on TBS four Saturday afternoons in a row and catch clips of while doing something else. They serve a purpose too.
- A Foreign Field. This was a BBC made for TV movie about three veterans returning to Normandy for the first time in 50 years. What a cast: Alec Guinness, Leo McKern, Edward Hermann, John Randolph and Lauren Bacall (a cast that was apparently persuaded to appear by Guinness, who also pushed the BBC to make the film). It looks like it was made for $10 and a bottle of whiskey, and was a very touching watch.
- Belfast. This is a look at the Troubles in Northern Island in the late 1960s, as told mostly from the point of view of a small boy. Because kids know. They know, as their parents debate if they should stay or go, that something is very wrong. It’s written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, and based on his experiences growing up in Belfast. It’s very good and goes back and proves my point up top: he’s best when he’s not directing himself (Jamie Dornan plays the fictional version of his dad. I’m glad he didn’t cast himself except in a alternate ending scene, which I think he was right to cut). Also Judi Dench as the grandmother reminded me so much of my maternal grandmother that I want to say, into the world, thank you for that.
Nail Polish of the Week
Studs & Spikes by Essie. This is a solid, shimmery gunmetal gray with a slight pink tint to it. Two thumbs up.
Until next time!
Jen A. Miller (she/her)
Notes from a Hired Pen ebook series
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