For the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly transitioning from academia to freelance writing. I do like writing. I like coming up with ideas, talking to people, piecing the words together, and then monitoring the reaction. I’m able to fit it into my day, which consists of a lot of “mom” chores.
This morning, I went to a special ed parents’ breakfast. At 1, I’ll make a pot of chili to have ready for dinner, because between 4 and 7, I have to take a kid to a swimming class, pick up a kid from cross country and go to a parent-teacher conference. In between those chores, I have three hours to do something. Freelance writing is my something.
But I’m getting fairly annoyed about the lack of pay for the writing. In the past couple of years, my paychecks for a week’s worth of work has shrunk to an embarrassing amount. I can’t continue. I would rather write for free on my own terms for this blog, than write for almost free for an organization that is making a profit from my work.
So, now I’m at a bit of a loss about what my next something should be.
Apt. 11d 
Consider fiction for young readers. It’s hardly possible to be more cliched than Spirit Animals and I’ve had to read through that thing twice already.
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College counseling? Writing tutoring?
I’m wondering these days if creative workers feel exploited enough that working for themselves (i.e. not getting paid) seems like a less exploitative option. If you need the money, you try to get paid for something you are not pouring your creative energies into. And, if you get lucky, maybe the work you do for free will take off, but you don’t find yourself expending effort to make it market worthy, only to receive insufficient compensation for the work.
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I live this dilemma, too.
My Plan B is that I sell my debut novel, followed by its foreign and movie rights, then I sell my novel-in-progress.
Clearly, I need to work out a different Plan B.
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There aren’t enough fun, creative, chewy jobs – and with your name in the papers every three months, always favorably, and hot and cold running secretaries, etc etc – to go around. There weren’t in 1956, but the ratio was better. Tyler Cowen says it will get worse. He’s probably right. My wife’s law school compatriots are making lots of money, but not having a lot of fun.
I have been staggeringly fortunate, myself, in my work – which would seem from the outside like kind of a dry hole, on the stimulation front. There was no obvious way to have gotten there, though, it was mostly luck. And, hot & cold running secretaries and my name in the papers, not so much.
So I think I am with Bee Jay, and that probably the best strategy for most of us is to find a reasonable way to make a living and to get our excitement from something else. Like, an online salon with many adoring acolytes. Or, a rose garden.
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