Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
Octavia E. Butler 264 pages Beacon Press (1979)
Read this if you like: Time travel sci-fi, Afro-horror, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Doomsday Book series by Connie Willis tl;dr summary: Modern black woman is pulled back in time to save her slaveholding ancestor.
I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about the skills you need to freelance, and honing those will certainly help you to succeed when you start a freelance career. Writing that post got me thinking about some other things that either helped me when I was starting out, or that I learned along the way and wish I’d known from the beginning.
Just for some context, I started freelancing mid-way through 2015. I’ve been doing it full-time ever since and it’s currently my only gig (though that hasn’t been the case the entire time). In those 7-ish years I’ve definitely made my share of mistakes and taken on some clients who were walking red flags in hindsight. Some of those missteps I think are an unavoidable part of venturing out as linguistic mercenary into the wild world of words for pay, but hopefully these tips can help other new freelancers make the transition a bit more smoothly.
Language and culture are inextricably linked. Using other languages in your fiction can help to create a three-dimensional, fully-realized world for the reader, but it can also pull them out of your story and leave them bored, confused, or frustrated if you overdo it.
Like many aspects of fiction (and life), it comes down to finding the right balance. This tends to be especially difficult for those who write their own languages—and understandably so. It takes a lot of work to write a language and you want to show it off. The best way to do that, though, is to integrate it smoothly into your overall storytelling.
You can think of speculative fiction as a kind of super-genre. Stories that live under this broad umbrella all deviate in some way from the laws and rules of everyday reality. That could mean they’re set in an entirely invented reality or in a world mostly like our own with a few minor tweaks, or anywhere in between.
The term speculative fiction was first coined by Robert Heinlein in the late 1940s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Its associations have shifted over the decades, though, from a term mostly syonymous with sci-fi to one that’s more fluid. In today’s parlance, speculative also includes fantasy and most horror, as well as stories that exist between the borders of these genres. It’s become an especially popular term among those who write settings or tropes from fantasy and sci-fi in a literary style.
Sarah Gerard 166 pages Two Dollar Radio (2015)
Read this if you like: Experimental literary fiction
tl;dr summary: Bulimic woman struggles with co-dependent relationship, astronomy, veganism.
Freelancing is arguably the easiest way to start writing for a living. Freelancer platforms certainly make it look appealing, and while you probably don’t need me to tell you most freelancers don’t work at beach or on a lakeside dock, these ads promote a more pervasive misperception, too—that if you can write well, you can be successful as a freelance writer.
The truth is more complicated. Yes, you do need to have a certain level of writing ability to be a freelancer, but you don’t need to be a “great writer” and having that kind of advanced mastery won’t guarantee you success. There are other skills that I’d argue are equally important if you want to turn freelance writing into a sustainable full-time career. Based on my experience, these are the most important.
“What genre do you write?” On the surface that seems like a pretty straightforward question, but anyone who’s spent some time in the literary world knows it can get weirdly complicated—especially for those of us who write in the styles often shoehorned under “genre” (AKA anything that’s not literary realism).
Gwendolyn Kiste 250 pages Trepidatio Publishing (2018)
Read this if you like: Atmospheric horror, Rust Belt narratives, sympathetic monsters
tl;dr summary: The girls of Denton Street rusted in the summer of 1980 and survivor Phoebe Shaw is back 30 years later to find out why.
The impetus for this post was a panel at this year’s Chicon/Worldcon. The focus of that panel was a bit broader, looking at cats across sci-fi and fantasy—not anthropomorphized, humanoid felines, which are their own unique subset of fictional races, and not other felines like lions and panthers, but Standard Issue Cats in human-dominated worlds.
There were a lot of great questions raised at that panel, like how storytellers use cats in their narratives, the difference between an animal and human character, and the broader role of pets and animals in general in human-centric sci-fi worlds. So I decided to take a closer look at some of my favorite space cats to see how their creators answered those questions.
Kerstin Hall 436 pages Tor (2021)
Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.
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