Seven Years as a Freelance Writer

There's a great little essay on The Awl by Richard Morgan about the trials and tribulations of freelance writing.

From the piece...

Even before I attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, I was writing features for Details that were being debated on "The O'Reilly Factor." I wrote one of the rare freelanced cover stories for the New York Daily News —a school scandal I had pitched to the New York Times only to be told never ever to use the word "scandal" in my pitch (they ended up chasing the story the next day; it took two reporters to re-report my story). I went to the Turkish countryside to write about a 600-year-old Turkish olive-oil wrestling tournament for ESPN. I lived at a research station in the Alaskan Arctic for the Times. I went to Peru for National Geographic. I went to keggers at New York magazine and went to parties with Sigur Ros and the cast of "Saturday Night Live." (Note: not the same party.) I was part of Topic, a genuinely cool-if-a-bit-precious "nonfiction literary journal" in Brooklyn. And I'm part of a new magazine, about videogame culture, called Kill Screen. Passion projects!

There's a lot of good times in freelancing! I had a bet with a Times reporter about who could get the phrase "that's how we roll, yo" in the paper without quotes; I won (though somewhat on a technicality), with an essay that, upon submission, got my editor to come over to me and give me an actual explicit compliment. I wrote about men in a wet T-shirt contest for the Wall Street Journal and got a gay male porn mention (with photo!) in Playboy. State attorneys general in California, Connecticut and New Jersey launched investigations into a shady business after I wrote a story about it in the Times. I wrote crazy opening sentences about boobies and gay Jews in a paper that prides itself on running "all the news that's fit to print." I was called "a great interviewer" by Dan Rather. I won awards. I was on television. There was just one day in all these seven years that I had an actual job, at Gawker; I quit after the first day, an event that ended up becoming good anecdote for someone else's story in the Sunday Times. I get invited back to my journalism school to speak to the class about "how to be a successful freelancer" and "the art of freelancing."

I once got paid $100 a word.

What's more, I did this all from my $875-a-month-Craigslisted apartment in the West Village, where I've lived for the past five years, mostly spending my days watching television, napping, noshing, strolling around, seeing matinees, playing The Sims, having sex and getting intoxicated.

That sounds like success, right? It may or may not be. Decide after reading.