Chinese school and Russian Soup

Kiska is learning Chinese in school, and seems to be adjusting pretty well. She brings home homework everyday of Chinese words (characters!) she has to practice writing. Basil is home with me, so he's not having to learn any Chinese yet. We're going to start looking for a kindergarden for him soon.

Our apartment building is on this large block. There are our five buildings (we're in building number three), there's a large garden and courtyard and two gates, then, once you walk out of the complex there are stores around the outside of the block as well. They include a furniture store, several convenience stores, an Internet cafe, hair dressers, restaurants, and, of course, Kiska's school is on our block too. On the way back from Kiska's school -- a five minute walk -- you pass by a restaurant, the hair dresser, the itnernet cafe, the convenience store, and the vegetable shop. The vegetable shop is really nice and I've been going in there every day. You can buy potatoes and cabbage for soup, and eggs and mayonnaise, and tomatoes and cucumbers and lots of different kinds of mushrooms. I've been cooking vegetable soup and frying potatoes and making tomato-cucumber salad. Yesterday, I cooked noodles that looked like spaghetti (and were very tasty) with spaghetti sauce. For breakfast everyday we have oatmeal, and sometimes I fry or boil eggs. Richard makes pancakes and bacon on weekends. WE DON'T EAT FROGS. :-)

I've taken the kids to Kentucky Fried Chicken once (didn't like it here) and to McDonalds twice (same as in US). We haven't been to a Chinese restaurant yet! We keep planning to go, but something always comes up. Richard has bought things from Chinese restaurants and brought them home, however -- mostly dumplings (like ravioli) and scallion pancakes. I don't like the dumplings at all but he keeps buying them. Well, the kids like them.

We haven't found sour cream here yet, which I miss to put in soup. I'm sure we will, I'll keep looking. The yogurt here is very much like kefir. We buy it plain (which is sweet) and strawberry (which is also sweet). If it was like American yogurt, we could use it instead of sour cream, but it isn't, so we can't.

My back pain is almost all gone. (It took a while!) I've been doing back exercises every night to make sure it doesn't come back. Richard bought a bicycle and rides back and forth to work at the Shanghai Daily. It takes him less time to go by bike than by taxi, he says.

It takes 16 yuan -- $2 -- to take a taxi to where Richard works. Other times, he walks or takes the subway.

I bought a laptop computer at a used computer shop, but am having problems with the operating system -- it's all in Chinese! A man will come tomorrow and install an English operating system on it. The man's name is Silly Billy and he's studying to be a doctor, and working as a computer doctor meanwhile. He's pretty nice, but doesn't speak much English. I don't speak much Chinese, but we get along fine anyway.

Today, we went to Richard's work and had some food in their cafeteria. Richard eats there every day because it's very cheap. For the four of us, dinner cost only 10 yuan -- just a little over a dollar. They have lots of different kind of food there, but I didn't like most of it and was scared to eat a lot of it. But I guess you get used to it -- Richard did, and likes it. He gets a certain amount of money that he can spend at the cafeteria and the grocery store in the building, and has to use it up. He usually buys milk and yogurt to bring home for the kids.

I'm starting to slowly get to know my way around. I met some of Richard's friends. One, a German woman, was very nice, quiet and pretty. Another, was an outspoken Australian woman named Michelle. I like her a lot. Michelle is going to take me out shopping later on this week, show me the good parts of town. She also has books she will lend me to read. I have nothing to read, so I like her just for that alone!

Richard also has a friend named Seth, an American, who (like Michelle) is teaching English here. And I've met some of the guys he works with at the newspaper, who seem pretty nice. I've been in touch with the Russians here, but haven't met any yet. Their next gettogether is in the middle of April. If I don't find sour cream by then, I'll ask them where to buy it!

How do you make a living as a freelance journalist

Pay for freelance journalism is atrociously low pay. But I think the problem goes deeper than stingy bosses, etc...

I think that journalism is one of those jobs, like tending bar, that you don't really have to know much in order to be able to do well. You need to be able to write the inverted pyramid, and you need to be able to ask questions and keep coming back until you get some answers.

So the college graduates are always going to be competing against non-J-school grads for jobs. I myself was a math major and only graduated from college because I was the eldest in a (poor, starving) immigrant family and couldn't let everybody down. Otherwise, I would have gone into newspaper work right out of high school -- and, given how persistent I am, I would have probably done as well if not better as I did with a degree. In fact, I know folks who haven't graduated from college who did extremely well.

Journalism is a trade. You get better at it the more you practice it, but there's really no body of knowledge associated with it, as there is with engineering, or medicine, or law, or any other profession. And I think the pay reflects that.

Then, you combine it with the fact that a lot of people want to be journalists -- or, at least, journalism majors. It's an easy major compared to most others (not much math or science, nothing to memorize, no big books to read, no languages to learn). And the job itself is pretty easy, since you're just talking to people then writing it down in a very minimalistic, formulaic way. Finally, for others, it's a step towards a career as a writer (I personally, planned to become Hemingway). So there will always be more people than jobs, again driving down the wages.

Another reason for low wages -- part-time freelancers. In the National Writers Union, the average income of its members (ie., those writers who cared enough to join a professional organization) was $4,000 a year. In effect, people are writing magazine and newspaper articles as a hobby, or just to see their names in print. How can you possibly compete against someone willing to do the work for free?

I don't know what to do about it. There are plenty of obvious answers, of course -- you can seek out niches where difficult knowledge is required, such as economics writing or science writing or business writing.

You can start your own publication, and get on the profitable side of the supply-and-demand curve.

You can join the National Writers Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Newspaper Guild, or another organization and lobby for higher wages. Or go around to high schools and talk folks out of becoming journalists.

You can supplement your reporting income with books or speaking fees, or teaching. (Many journalists do this.)

And you can downgrade your lifestyle. My husband and I are moving to China to write about the economy there, and we're going to have to radically change the way we live -- instead of a house, a small apartment. Instead of cars, subway rides. Which, actually, sounds a lot like moving to New York. :-)

On the plus side, those of us who have fought our way to our journalism jobs know what it's like to work hard to go after something you want. I've found that, when competing against folks who've had things handed to them, I come out ahead a good proportion of the time. I've learned to do my research, to follow through, to be persistent, and to schmooze harder than other folks. I think that's why the folks who make fortunes (as opposed to those who inherit and spend them) often came from working-class or immigrant backgrounds.

When I worked in Russia, covering the post-Soviet civil wars for Reuters, I often came across correspondents living the good life. They basically hung out with each other, had a lot of parties, went skiing, hopped over to Europe on a regular basis. I hung out with local journalists, only went up into the mountains with guerilla fighters -- not skiiers -- learned the local languages because I couldn't afford to hire translators when I was just starting out (and then later, I didn't need to), instead of hiring drivers and cars I would hitch rides with soldiers -- on tanks, boats, armored personnel carriers, even one ride in the cargo hold of a military plane. Instead of staying in hotel rooms, I would stay with locals -- friends of friends, local journalists, or local police officials, politicians, or military units.

As you can imagine, I wasn't filing the rehashed press releases that everyone else was.

I see the fact that I can live for weeks on tea and bread as a competitive advantage. That I can talk on an equal level to a soldier or local businessman, without patronizing him. That I have no problem crashing on a couch, or pallet, or on a greatcoat in a trench, or sleeping with bedbugs.

Hopefully, I won't have to do that in China, especially now that I'm bringing my kids with me. But if I do, no big deal, and my kids can learn to deal the same way I did. You turn on the light, jerk back the blanket, swipe the little suckers onto the floor and wack them with a slipper. The next morning, you fumigate, and go away for a couple of days to let everything air out.

-- Maria

Q: How do you go from writing for local business publications to national ones?

I find that the transition from local business to national business pubs is very straightforward -- my husband did it in a few months.

Here's my advice:

• Hire a cheap college student to set up a web site for you. Feel free to have him steal mine. A low-cost way of doing it is to take the free webspace that you get with your email account (which has a nasty-looking URL, I'm sure), pay $10 bucks to register a domain with mydomains.com, and have the new domain forwarded to your free but ugly one (but visitors will only see the nice clear URL you registered.).

• Get a list of pubs who might be interested in business or technology writers (go to Google and type in -- "managing editor" "business editor" -- or "business editor" "technology editor" -- to get newspaper and magazine mastheads. I've done that, and am currently working with a database of about 500 editors at target pubs (and I've hired my brother to keep the database current and expand on it) because I use it a lot for marketing and it's a pain to do it from scratch each time you want to send out some queries.

• Pick a general story topic that could be of interest to many different kinds of pubs -- for example, is it time to upgrade to Windows XP? All the bugs are now discovered, support for Windows 2000 and Win 98 is about to expire soon, there are patches for major vulnerabilities, drivers are in place, etc... Any business (or consumer!) publication could use a story like this -- if they haven't run one already. For example, you might want to target local newspapers, write basically the same story for each one, but quote a local business owner (easy enough to find -- call the local chamber) instead of the one you had.

• Write a query letter titled "freelancer introduction", say you're an experienced business and technology writer in the first paragraph, mention Windows as a particular area of expertise, give links to a couple of clips on the topic, a link to your website, and suggest a possible story topic. (I find that I've had a good response to this approach, but editors usually assign me something different from what I suggested!)

• Now send this same letter to a whole bunch of different editors. Except in the story topic, you would customize it for their publication -- when hotel managers are planning to upgrade, or Houston businesses are planning to upgrade, etc... If you have particular industry sector expertise, it's even better -- when small shop owners in Houston are planning to upgrade, for example.

• If you come across a particularly interesting story topic, don't hesitate to pitch it to national publications the same way -- start with trades, they pay well and are easy to break into to ($.50 to $2.25 a word) as well as computer mags like Computerworld, eWeek, InfoWorld, Business 2.0.

Advice about pitching freelance stories to editors

To be a successful freelancer, you really have to focus on networking and marketing. I met my primary editor at a financial services convention, and saw her again at other industry events, and when I had quit Computerworld she called me right up and offered me a regular column.

I also do cold-calls and cold-emails to editors to round out the number of articles I do. I haven't had reason to complain about the volume of work I have -- only that, in my experience, the articles I freelance tend to be very formulaic. Editors want to know what they're getting, and they want something very predictable and reliable. They also only want to see the stuff that you've done a lot of, whereas when you're on staff, you write on a wider variety of topics.

So, for example, I write about web services on Wall Street, Web services as a technology, Web services in corporate finance departments, and now I'm pitching Web services in the insurance industry. Same exact story each time, except with a slightly different focus. So the more often I do an article, the easier it is to sell another one just like it.

As you can imagine, the rut wears pretty deep pretty fast. Doing all my interviews by phone doesn't help either.

Anyway, I've been freelancing for three years now, and was freelancing for about four years before going to Computerworld. My advice? First of all, set up a website. If you do, it means you can email pitch letters without having to put your resume and clips into attachments -- you can just put in links to all the materials you want the editors to see.

Then, for pitching, I use a "T-shaped" approach (think of a bunch of capital T's, stacked one on top of the other in a tall, and vaguely unsteady column).

You take your starting point. Say, you've got a story about a sick horse that was published somewhere. Now you try to sell a variation of that story to as many places as you can find -- parenting mags, kid mags, outdoor mags, horse mags. That's the tall part of the T -- you're writing sick horse stories over and over again.

But, now that you know those editors, you can pitch a wider variety of horse stories to them. Horses and kids, horses and vets, horses and transportation, what have you. You're on the outstretched wings of the T.

Now, let's say that the vet story rang a bell with you. So you can go up that vertical, selling horse vet stories to a bunch of different magazines. Then you go out horizontally again -- doing a variety of stories about vets. And then you repeat the cycle, each time adding more columns to your tree of T's.

At least, that's the theory. I'm actually too lazy to put everything in practice. (Visualize me kicking myself in my own butt.)

Freelance writers don't get paid much. How do you make a living doing this?

Freelancing is not an easy life, but it is possible to make decent money doing it. Unlike fiction writing, whether you either hit it big or barely struggle along, it's possible to make a good living, say, $50-100K, by just doing a good job.

The trick is to move "upmarket" -- to the higher-paying pubs -- as quickly as you can. That means collecting a lot of clips and immediately presenting them to the next editor up in the food chain. In general, business writing pays more -- and business features are just as easy to write as any other feature. Don't overlook business-to-business publications -- regional business magazines, trade publications, and newsletters.

They pay well and generally (though not always) have lower writing standards, so you don't have to be quite as polished to earn the same amount of money when you're just starting out and don't have your writing style down yet.

Although you probably think you do. The longer I've been a writer, the more I've come to be aware of the deficiencies in my own work. And when I started out, I thought I was Hemingway!

How important is networking to getting a job?

When circumstances brought me back to the U.S. after living abroad, I found myself on a farm in western Massachusetts, disconnected from all my former editors, friends, and colleagues.

I quickly found temporary low-paying freelance work just by knocking on doors, but it was networking that really helped open up the world to me again. Other people don't just help you find work, they help you think about work in new ways. In my case, that led me to considering different kinds of markets, not local, whereas previously I had always met my editors in person. They also taught me about the importance of running your freelance work like a business -- with good record keeping, marketing, and sales strategies, continual training, specialization, and diversification.

First of all, I'm grateful for the local NWU Local 5, and I recommend to all and sundry that get they involved in their local writer's union. Other local alternatives include business groups, chambers of commerce, and volunteer organizations. The key is to do more than just come to meetings -- help edit the newsletters, co-chair a conference, organize a mentoring program, set up a website. I have a theory that all the effort you put into an organization will come back to you, one way or another. A karmic circle, if you will.

As a result of my work, I was invited to join a local writers' group. I have been meeting with these five other experienced and successful writers now for almost six years, and I am immensely grateful to them for their support and kind advice.

If you can't find a group in your area to join, start one. It's a great way to keep on track, and share your experiences with people who've been there -- or who are just starting out.

Then, think regionally and nationally. I joined the Society of Professional Journalists, and did some work on their International Journalism Committee. There are also a number of other national and regional organizations for writers -- the Society for Technical Communicators, for example, and Boston's Society of Documentation Professionals (where I was a board member for a year). You might have to drive a ways to get to a meeting, or do everything by phone and email, but they broaden your horizons, give you increased visibility in your profession, and force you to measure yourself against a higher standard than you perhaps might have working only locally.

Finally, on the issue of hiring someone who's good on paper versus someone's who's recommended:

I've been in a hiring position a few times in my life, and given my choice, I'd pick the latter over the former. Why? First of all, because what looks good on paper isn't always what works out in real life, and references are handpicked -- if a writer has 97 bad experiences and three good ones, it's the three good ones who'll end up as references. Whereas if I know the writer personally, and have seen him or work work in a professional capacity for an organization in which we're both members, or have friends who'll tell me the truth, I can form a much better opinion of his or her abilities.

There's also another side -- a writer who comes recommended has an obligation to the person who recommended him to do a good job. If he lets me down, he's not only making himself look bad but the recommender as well. I've often assigned stories to freelance writers who swore up and down that they were on track and everything was coming together, only to ask for an extension at the last minute and then -- once it was too late to assign the story to some else -- come back and explain that their aunt was sick and they couldn't finish the project. (You can imagine the hair pulling that goes on when that happens!) And what can you do? If I had known them personally, I could have said, "Bob, I know you don't have an aunt. Get off your butt and file that article!" With an unknown writer, the best you can do is cross them off your list -- and then try to find another writer to replace them.

The main differentiator between the reliable writers and the not-so-reliable ones (and we're not talking writing talent here -- if they can just get the quotes and turn the piece in on time, that's enough to put them on my good list) was their committment to the profession. Is their writing secondary? Something they do between other projects? A hobby? A way to pay a couple of bills under a better job comes along? Or are they firmly committed to writing as a career? It's not a question of how many hours they put in a week -- I've freelanced with two kids, I know sometimes you can only do so much. It's a question of how seriously you take those hours. And involvement in professional organizations and regular attendance at professional events shows that you're someone who's in it for the long haul.

About working with editors who change your words

A beginning writer asks:

My editors keep messing up my stories. How can I keep that from happening?

My advice: If your skin is the least bit sensitive DON'T READ YOUR CLIPS AFTER THEY COME OUT.

Don't. Really.

All sorts of awful things are in there, and if you don't know about them, you won't get upset.

If a source calls you up about a factual mistake, just apologize to the source, take the blame, promise to try to get it fixed, and pass the request for a correction up to the editor.

If a reader calls you up and says that the article doesn't have any factual mistakes, but misses an important part of the story, tell the reader she's absolutely right --then pitch it as a follow-up article to the editor.

But, you might say: "I know that there are mistakes in there, even if no else is bothered by it. I can't just let it go! What if another editor sees the article? I'll never work anywhere again."

Now, if you're writing about a topic that requires specialized knowledge, you can ask your editor to let you see the final proofs before they go to print, just to double-check that everything is accurate. And you can also train copy editors to not retype certain things, like numbers or names, because typos can creep in.

But, admit it -- you're probably less concerned about factual mistakes than about stylistic changes. Factual mistakes you just fix. Style, you can argue about for days with no results.

So don't do it. Really. Just don't do it.

But what if you can't help it? What if the editor is one of those sadists who makes you look over the final proofs for mistakes before publication, and you can't help noticing that all your best metaphors are gone and the structure is rearranged to the point of silliness

Here's what you do: first, glance over the words in quotation marks and make sure that they are true to the original (some cleaning-up permitted, but nothing that makes the source look as if he said the opposite from what he really intended). Then scan over the statistics, and the spelling of names and places.

Finally, check the chronologies -- mistakes sometimes creep in here during editing.

If you happen to come across a grammar mistake or typo, that's fine too -- but it's not really part of your job at this point. The copy editor should have caught that, you're just doing him a favor.

Your *only* job is to make sure the facts are still correct.

Do NOT read over for style. It's the newspaper's or magazine's style now. Don't read for structure.

And don't ask them to put back your original words -- if they liked them in the first place, they would have left them in. Remember that the customer is always right, and the customer is the editor.

Eventually, if it's important to you, you'll get good enough and famous enough to be able to dictate style terms. By then, though, you'll probably also be wise enough to know that an editor is the writer's best friend. As a general rule, it's the stuff that you like the most in an article, those fancy turns of phrase and lofty comparisons, that are really the worst and distract the reader from the content. Just let it go.

And when you cut out your clip, don't read it over for a few years. When you finally do, after getting a bit of distance, you might be amazed at how good you sound.