Prairie Den: Alison Lake

After being home with my son full-time for eight months, the novelty of keeping the house sparkling clean had fully worn off. I suddenly craved additional challenges and stimulation and tried to think of ways to work from home. Freelance writing seemed an obvious and interesting choice to me.

I have always loved to write: letters, stories, diary entries, proposals, and essays. I kept my own journal from age six through nineteen and experimented with creative writing and poetry until college and graduate school brought research papers and essays. Shortly after my son was born in 2001, I spent about eight months working on a 'novel', which I spent more time planning than actually writing. I did manage to steer the project to the one hundred-page mark, thanks to extensive characterization and setting development. However, my glaring lack of sustainable plot brought my daydream to a screeching halt. I wrote so inconsistently that I reluctantly stopped out of frustration and disappointment.

Thankfully, my urge to write soon returned when I began to explore the freelance world. As I researched the field online, I tried to jumpstart a regular writing routine. I started with reflective essays and articles which required little research and whose background derived mostly from my own knowledge. I wrote narrative essays about my experiences as the wife of a Navy pilot, as a Catholic, and as a mother, and instructive articles on parenting and the art of baking bread from scratch.

In the meantime, when I wasn't writing, I read a couple of books on freelance writing and learned how to best submit my work. Marcia Yudkin's writing books, such as Writing Articles about the World Around You, are immensely helpful and provide usable information. These books are inexpensive and available new or used on Amazon.com. I also discovered Writersmarket.com, the best starting point for any writer looking to submit to magazines and newspapers. The site is updated daily and provides an exhaustive listing of publishing markets and the type of work accepted.

I submitted my first articles blind to several publications which accepted unsolicited manuscripts. As I waited impatiently for feedback, I focused on querying magazines to distract myself. I brainstormed ideas on an upcoming trip to Norway as a source for possible articles. I browsed the list of publications on Writers Market to see which magazines might be interested in an article with a Norway angle. I only looked at publications which accepted e-mail queries. My time was short, as I was scheduled to leave in a few weeks, and I thought I would try the e-mail route before spending time and money on snail mail. Besides, I had no clips to send out because I had never been published before.

E-mail and the Internet make the submission and query process so much faster and widespread than in past days. I can send out a number of queries at one time, all for free, and all with instant delivery. Of course I always e-mail each recipient separately, never with a mass mailing list, and I no longer expect my query will be read immediately or even that month. Turnaround time can be excruciatingly slow, and often there is no response at all.

Yet perhaps rejection is easier to accept in the online format, less personal somehow than a handwritten note. I have also been surprised with the number of helpful personal responses I have received by e-mail, even rejections which somehow don't sting as much when individually written with a specific reason, and occasionally with a helpful suggestion or invitation to submit again.

Many writing books contain sections on the art of writing query letters, and there are many approaches. When crafting a letter, I am always careful to include detailed information about what I plan to write, specific reasoning and motivation for the article, and a brief outline of the article in bullet points.

For the several queries which have worked for me so far, many more have been rejected, or worse, seemingly ignored. I figure this indignity is an unavoidable fact of the freelancing life, and I continue to push on. It's essential to save all article ideas for future use, because they can always be reworked or submitted at a different time. Meanwhile, I hope to sharpen my query composition skills and have more success with future tries.

My first article acceptance was a delayed surprise. I mailed off my bread-baking article to a cooking magazine in February. Several months later, having almost forgotten the article, I received a contract in the mail with a promise of $195. I mailed back the contract and received the check a month or two later. The article just came out this September, and through it all, I still haven't had contact with the editor of the magazine. That check is the biggest one I have yet received. More common are checks for $35, $50, and sometimes $100, along with a few articles published for no pay, mostly online. Right now, I don't expect much more than a little extra spending money. It's just nice to be published.

The military wife article I wrote in January, which I still consider one of my best ones, has still not been accepted. I keep trying. I am confident I just need to find the right market. My inspirational article about childbirth was only recently accepted for no pay by a Christian print magazine. Most of my articles thus far have been written from home with little outside research, with the exception of two articles which focus on Norway. I have written several op-ed type pieces, two of which were accepted by state newspapers, and another by a Catholic academic journal. I have also tapped into my parenting experience with a few how-to articles. My documents folder still contains several articles which I hope to sell somewhere.

There have been plenty of dry periods with no word at all, save a few form rejection letters in my mailbox. I took a few weeks off this summer while undergoing morning sickness with my second pregnancy. After all the seeds I had planted in months prior, in the form of query letters and submissions, I was fairly certain replies would continue to roll in while I took a rest. Ironically, the fact I wasn't generating work almost seemed to ensure that responses stopped coming in. As soon as I started feeling better, I got back to work on article ideas and queries.

For motivation and to generate more work, I maintain a portfolio of all my writing samples, print and online, and I keep several copies of each to mail out with queries. It's satisfying to leaf through and view my work which has been accepted and published.

Fortunately my negative experiences with writing submissions so far have been few, although memorable. When I queried magazines for a story on cuisine in southwest Norway, one editor snapped back with a curt e-mail: "Why would anyone want to eat Norwegian food? Reindeer meat and porridge? Yuck. I don't think so." I used this knee-jerk rejection as an occasion to name my article, "Beyond Reindeer Meat and Porridge: Cuisine in Southwest Norway". The article, along with photographs, was accepted and published by a large metropolitan newspaper in the South and also by a national travel magazine.

As a side project this year, I also compiled and submitted a book proposal which was sparked by an article I wrote for Rural Heritage. During the process of creating the proposal, querying, researching, and then sending out mailings, my expectations were low. I wanted mainly to gain experience crafting a book idea: a collection of essays about present-day farmers who work with draft horses. I heard back from quite a few publishers who at least considered the idea with some interest before deciding the book would be difficult to market. I was pleased to even hear back personally from various book editors. I fell asleep at night imagining my proposal being discussed at editorial meetings.

One publishing company did send me a poorly worded letter which suggested I might have used the company's "intellectual property in preparing the proposal." However, I originally sent this company a one-page query letter describing my book project, not the sixteen-page proposal I had compiled. I first took the letter personally, then laughed it off with my husband and replied to the company with a request that they tell me specifically which part of my query contained the intellectual property to which they referred. I have yet to hear back, and figure the letter was a computer generated response to specific phrases in my query.

I am ready now to expand my approach to more investigative articles with expert interviews and outside research. Online resources help me to work from home as much as possible and conduct mainly phone interviews and online research. One essential resource for gathering expert interviews is http://www2.profnet.com , a site which connects journalists with experts in many fields. For example, when I was researching a possible article on the effects of antidepressants during pregnancy, I sent out a request for experts knowledgeable about this subject. Within two days, I had more than a dozen responses in my inbox, along with offers for interviews and helpful information. Registration is free and you are required to present some evidence of previous publishing credits.

Working from home, especially with a toddler and another baby on the way, presents its own challenges. There are several elements to my own nascent freelance career which naturally ebb and flow: the market for articles in general and what editors need at that time; my struggle to maintain a consistent writing schedule; and finally, my own unpredictable pattern of motivation and inspiration, or lack thereof.

My long-term goal is to eventually maintain a writing career which keeps me consistently busy throughout the year, and which provides some degree of a second income to the household. I also like to dream about working on assignment or becoming a regular contributor to a magazine. Above all, I intensely enjoy the satisfaction of freelance writing, so that part of the dream is already fulfilled. In the meantime, I will continue to learn the ropes as I experiment and explore within this individualized career choice. I am very new at this and have so much yet to learn.

Right now, freelance writing provides a much bigger ongoing thrill than my novel did. The consistent ups and downs of rejections and more occasional acceptances feed my slightly manic personality which alternately thrives and suffers in such conditions. At least every day there is a new possibility for a letter to arrive in the mailbox with the junk mail, for an e-mail from an editor to ping into my inbox. Through it all, I know my writing style, research, and knowledge of the 'publishing world' all benefit, regardless if my ideas sell or fall flat.

Alison Lake writes for magazines and newspapers. Her second book, Living Off Balance, is due out in fall 2005.