There is some good news, though, I am now a professional writer. I sold a story for ten dollars. Not a fortune, but they might as well have handed me the keys to the kingdom. It is not the first time someone paid me to write, though. Once, I stumbled across a site that paid $8.00 for blog posts. You had to write about products or services for companies. I wrote a post about oil changes, (I don’t know anything about oil changes, but a little research was all I needed) and after I fixed the errors POW, eight samoleans in my pay pal account. I was thrilled.
Next I chose Toyota Forklifts. I love my Toyota and I have driven a forklift before so it was a natural. I sent it off, making plans for my eight large, and they sent it back saying it was too filled with errors. I double checked it, actually bought an app to check sentence structure, spelling, grammar, verb and subject agreements. There were a few things I fixed and sent it back. And they said it was not good enough, and I could no longer write for them. I could have lived with “you just don’t know enough about forklifts,” or “you are too wordy, and self important,” but they said I just didn’t write well enough. But, I didn’t quit. I just quit getting paid.
And now I hit the big time, ten dollars.
It was a great story, too. But, the ending stunk. I submitted it to a lot of places and almost universally they said, “good story, weak ending.” I sent it to Smarty Pants, and they said. “You should make this the ending, it is really the climax, and add a line making a refernce to the opening.” And I did, and it was great.
Editors are amazing things. This story was transformed with one edit into something worth ten big ones. I write a monthly column
for The Wild Word, (here is a link) and they have two editors. Sometimes I will send them a draft and they will send it back with notes and suggestions about what I should add. Once in a while it is almost scary. I will think, “Oh my God, they are looking right into me, they can see what I’m thinking.” But, they are always right, and it always turns out much better. I love editors.Part of what has kept me away from my blog is my book. Most of you know, I am working on a book. And, if you didn’t know. I am working on a book. It is not the book I was working on last year. That is next, but a different book, and it was awful. Dead, wooden words staring with cold, lifeless eyes at me. And I said, this sucks. So I went back and started breathing a little life into the people, thinking about them as people, with a past and a future, things not even mentioned in the book. And, it got better. In one point a minor character, introduced briefly to explain a quirk in the protagonist loses his wife to cancer, and it was so sad, so heart breaking (to me, anyway) I almost cried. And I thought, wow this is good.
