Being a freelancer is scary.
I’ve been a full-time freelance writer for only a couple weeks now, and I’m already starting to get anxious about making money. I’ve had a few pitches accepted from some outlets, like Science of Us, that I’m always excited to work for. But nothing messes with your confidence quite like sending out emails all day and having them disappear into the ether.
It seems like I’m going in cycles. Some days, I feel like I’ve made a big mistake, that I should go back to teaching as soon as I can or start applying for office jobs. Other days, I feel like this was the best decision of my life, and the future holds only possibility.
No, things haven’t been quite like I imagined. I still spend most of the day sitting down staring at a screen. But when I need to, I can gallivant off in search of a story. Next week, I’m free-diving with giant manta rays! That’s the kind of freedom I always dreamed of, and I hope it doesn’t come at too steep a price.
Recently Published
As a former high school teacher and longtime banned book reader, these kinds of stories always ruffle me. Book banning always makes me think of fascism. When I taught Fahrenheit 451, we began by reading about the Holocaust. Destroying ideas is always the beginning, the first slide into authoritarianism. There’s only a small step between silencing a person’s ideas and trying to silence the person permanently. The juxtaposition of book banning and the separation of children from their parents at the border has been too close for comfort for me.
“Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” – Heinrich Heine
On Freedom & Some Reading Lists
As I’ve been struggling this week, I’ve also been thinking about freedom. My own, yes, but also the freedom that we would like to shape our nation. I can’t pretend that the United States was forged without blood or subjugation. I do know that many of us would like our nation to be free moving forward. That means we have a lot of work still to do. Sometimes, I don’t know how I should help. I think though that writing honestly and speaking truth has value. So I’m going to stay the course, even when it feels too hard, and I’ll hope my voice reaches those who need it the most.
Books On Freedom and Tyranny
Nonfiction
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
Fiction
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
By Night in Chile by Robert Bolaño
1984 by George Orwell
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
Which books would you add to these reading lists? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
By the way, my book giveaway is still running! Enter by Friday to win a free hardback book.
3 Responses
Hey! Loved the article and added some of the titles to my reading list. Why is Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago considered “fiction”. I’ve been under the impression that it was non-fiction.
Because I think I meant to put Ivan Denisovich instead and then got distracted. Lol whoops. Thanks for pointing that out.
[…] took a little too long to write another blog. But I swear, it’s for a good reason. I wrote the last one when I had just set out into the wild, scary world of freelance writing. I thought I was going to […]