Looking Back On the Past Year.
Posted: Tuesday, May 26, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
Well, my job with the Lincoln Daily News is now one year old. Like everything in my writing life, this part of it was an accident.
I had left the local print publication when they were taken over by corporate buffoons who started gutting staff and thus quality in order to pay back the debt they had incurred buying the 152 year old paper. That didn't set well with me so I decided to just spend more time concentrating on my web business of helping coach new would-be authors.
The agreement was that I was on my own with no specific days and although I would be happy to grab a story that the owners wanted done, I could also just run the town, find my own stories and submit them as I had the time.
It was a perfect little arrangement and I started to gear up for increasing my writing clients to keep the money coming in.
Like most things I do, I found myself really getting into the stories around the community that had always been ignored before. Like school kids doing something great or a business beating the odds and having a huge success while everyone else blamed their demise on the economy.
It took only a few months and I started turning in ten to twelve articles a month.
I was having fun and making a difference as people started calling me or e-mailing me to tell me their positive story that no one had wanted before.
The LDN owners had begun their publication nine years ago on just that premise of being a source of all news in the community especially all the positive things that had been ignored before.
The problem was that LDN didn't have enough manpower and also needed someone who knew most of the community and could establish sources for information fairly quickly.
After a few months of submitting articles I was asked if I wanted to take over managing content of the paper. This was totally unexpected and I was surprised when it was offered to me. The income was good. It wasn't enough on its own but the owners gave me leeway to spend time with my other pursuits understanding that I had a financial commitment called bills that I needed to cover.
As the year has progressed, we have grown a great deal and so has my pay. I now am full time with afternoon and evening hours still available for my writing clients.
I also have been having a ball, getting to rekindle old friendships as well as making hundreds of new ones this past year.
In my E-book on writing opportunities I talk about being flexible in jobs as a real key to making a living as a writer. I also talk about getting yourself out there in the public eye so that people will recognize your name and your work. It all takes time but there are still opportunities in the world of writing if you give it the effort, time and patience that it requires.
I wish that if there was one thing that I could get through to new writers and new authors is that writing for a living rarely just comes right away.
It's almost like learning to run a Marathon. At first you get winded or are slow. It takes years of practice to get physically better and better until you can run the great distance and hold your own with others.
That's why I think a place like Searchwarp is so important. It is here that you can hone your skills and get better and better. It is also a place where you can establish an identity not only as a writer but as the person you are by what you write.
Every week, I receive communications from someone who has decided that the first thing they have ever written will be this book they have always wanted to write. On almost every occasion I tell them it isn't their time yet based on what they have sent me.
I by no means have arrived as a writer. But I do know that continued effort and work can lead to lucky opportunities. And to a writer, opportunities are like gold.
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