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How once woman went from being a SAHM of four to a published freelance science journalist |
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I'm revising this intro after more than 15 years to better reflect my intention When I started this blog in 2004, I was a stay at home mom to two small children, a college graduate with a degree in English and Astrophysics. By 2007, I had four small children, ages newborn, 2, 4, and 6. For several years, Writing.com was how I kept my sanity. This blog began, first as a way of staying connected. Later, when I worked on a novel, I used it to stoke the writing fires as I plotted out short stories and the next step of my novel. Ultimately, I moved my writing preparation to "Invalid Item"  In 2010, I became a single mom who had homeschooled her children for several years. I had a 2, 4, 6 and 8 year old and had never had a "real" full time job, since I was married while in college. Everyone told me that I would have to buckle down and take on a "real" job. Instead, I decided to attempt to live my dream: to make it as a writer. I knew that if I didn't try then, I would never really dive in. I counted my money and set a deadline. If I hadn't began making a decent (defined) amount of money after so many months, I would suck it up and get a J-O-B. After some thought, I decided to play to my strengths. I served an internship at Sky & Telescope magazine while in college and enjoyed writing about space and astronomy. With an astrophysics degree, I thought I would be able to sell myself more easily, and a small niche should be easier to penetrate. It's been about ten years since I was first paid for an article on Space.com. In that time, writing - journalism - has been my primary moneymaker. I've often thought about setting up a blog on my website - www.astrowriter.com - but just haven't gotten around to it. There are a few things I would like to share for those who are interested in scientific journalism in general. Now that I'm back on WDC, there's no reason not to combine the two and use the site blog for that sort of interaction. There are certainly plenty of folks on this site interested in the publication process. So while I'll probably meander around some, that's the intention of of this blog: to share some of my struggles as a published journalist and to help answer oft-asked questions. |
| Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did. What would have happened if you chose the other path? Ugh this is maybe not the best day for introspection of the sort requested. I had my third contractor over to give me an estimate about the cracks in my basement. Big numbers, baby, big numbers. Well, I suppose 'big' is in perspective; in this case, it's between half to a third of my annual income. That's big enough - or too big - for me. So the most obvious fork that leads from that is the one where I decided to buy this house, which my step-father (not a contractor) built. But I don't want to go that way. Instead, I'd like to take a look at the fork that brought me to science journalism. I've always said I wanted to be a writer. Like most people - especially on this site, I suspect - I leaned towards writing fiction. Fiction, most of you know, is a difficult world to break into, and so the dream remained just a dream. I started college as an English major (creative writing). After a semester, I decided to add astrophysics to the list and became a double major. When people asked me what I wanted to do, I would tell them that I planned to write about astrophysics, but that was never actually my goal. I intended to go into journalism, but found out after I arrived at the college that their journalism major was notsomuch. Hence creative writing. Then, between my junior and senior year, I took an internship at an astronomy magazine, Sky & Telescope (if you know astronomy magazines, you know this is one of two big deals, even back in the 90s). I found out that I really enjoyed writing about astronomy. Enter the first potential fork. I had just started dating a guy in Atlanta at the end of the school year. To be honest, I was in a funk after breaking up with my high school boyfriend, and went out with this guy specifically because I was going to be leaving Atlanta in less than a month to head to Massachussets for my internship. But then he followed me to Boston - not in a creepy way, but it was kind of sweet. I ended up hanging out with him a lot, and in truth I made a pretty poor showing at my internship. Long story short, we got married that winter, and not long after I graduated, I was a mom. I've always wondered what would have happened if he hadn't come to Boston. I think I would have made a better showing in my internship, and a lot of the interns wound up working for S&T, so I could have potentially parlayed that into a post-college job. I also think we wouldn't have gotten married, and that's a whole nother path to follow. But this also isn't the fork I wanted to dwell on. Fast forward ten years or so, and find me as a single mom with four kids. My ex and I had an amiable divorce - so amiable that a lot of our friends suggested that we should get remarried. They didn't understand that my mom and dad threw things at each other, with lots of screaming, and I barely saw my dad. Or that I didn't want that for my kids. So we worked hard to keep things generally on good terms. In the intervening ten years, I'd had a small job or two. I did babysitting, and then did the books, for a local gym. I did some medical transcription. Nothing huge. Not really a lot to put on a resume. So there I was, somewhat terrified of having to go out and be the sole breadwinner, minus child support, for my kiddos and me, having never had a 'real' 40 hour a week job. I sat down and started listing things that I would like to do and things that I would be good at. Some of that process was made using this blog, incidentally. I decided that I should take a chance and follow my dream, at last. I knew that if i didn't do it at that time, I most likely never would. I had no debt, because we'd paid off everything but the house and my ex took that because I couldn't afford it. I had a few thousand dollars in the bank from splitting our emergency fund. I planned out how long that would last and decided that I would give the writing things a try. If by the time I was approaching the end of the money, I still wasn't professional, then I would go and get a j-o-b. I had originally planned to write fiction, and wrote a novel in a (non-NaNoWriMo) month. However, I decided that fiction was a bit too speculative to head into without something else to feed me. Back when I was at S&T, I interviewed someone at the American Museum of Natural History who had told me that it was great to find someone with an English and Astrophysics degree, and that I should call him if I ever needed a job. I wound up volunteering to get their professional blog on their website back up and running for free for a period of three months, at which point we would re-evaluate and see if they liked it enough to pay me. In the meantime, I was generating clips of writing about astronomy, which I sent to Space.com. I wound up writing for them, and have gone on to write for other publications. The process, of course, took a few months, and things were shaky. A lot of people were very doubtful about this idea. Writing, as I'm sure everyone on this site knows, is a hard career to make it at. I had the benefit of a degree in astrophysics, which made the idea of writing about space and astronomy a bit easier to approach for me and easier to sell my editors on. Now, I don't even mention it when working with a new editor; instead, I send them links to my published clips, which are far more important. But the first few months were terrifying for me, and it didn't help to have everyone telling me to go get a 9-5 job. I knew that, once I did that, I would be too worn out as a single mom to try for my dream for quite some time. That's the fork I wanted to talk about. What would have happened if I did what everyone with any sense was urging me to do? Today, I have somewhere around 10 cover stories for print magazines like S&T, Astronomy, and Discover - I have honestly lost count - and am paid around $1/word (different sites pay different rates, of course). I don't work 40 hours, but I do track the hours I work, including things like looking for pitches and billing, and if I did manage 40 hours, I'd be making six figures. I probably should do 40 hours instead of 10-20, especially with things like my stupid foundation, but that's another discussion. Mind you, for many of the past 10 years, I've been homeschooling 4, then 3, then 2, now 1 of my kids (two are attending the public high school). I love my job. I love reading about the research. I really enjoy talking to scientists about their work, and hearing some great perspectives. I've interviewed several astronauts. I 'stole' Brian May (guitarist from Queen)'s sandwich (okay I had permission but still). I was at JPL with the folks who worked on Cassini when it dove into Saturn's atmosphere in its last moments. I rang in 2019 celebrating New Horizon passing its second target. I'm on first name basis with quite a few researchers and mission leads. I also enjoy the writing, making everything come together into one cohesive piece. Sometimes it makes me crazy. Sometimes I want to tear my hair out. But then it's finished and I love it. So what would have happened if I took a 40 hour a week? I'd probably still be there in Pennsylvania, or maybe I would have transferred down to Georgia still. I'd have a 9-5 job that I most likely would put down at 5 o'clock sharp, probably something at a bank or whatever. I'd think every now and then about being a writer, but I'd probably only now, after 10 years, start thinking about trying, now that my kids are older and go out every chance they get. I also want to point out that one of the reasons I was able to take the risk was because I didn't have debt. What if we hadn't decided to suck it in for a year and pay off my student loans and our credit card bills? What if we hadn't gone forward without those debts, building up an emergency fund that I wound up using half of to live on? I took a risk, but with four kids, it was a calculated risk. And I'm very glad I did. edited to add: while commenting on Cadie Laine   's post "30-DBC May 12 Let's Eat!" , I realized that I should have added one other caveat. One of the things before making this decision that I did was address what my worst-case scenario was. For me, the worst case scenario would have been my kids, homeless and without food. I realized that, thanks to my ex-husband's close-knit family, my kids would always have someone to take them in, even if both sets of our parents passed away, and my ex and I also passed away. My kids would always have a roof over their heads. At the same time, our church has one of the world's best welfare systems, which means that, even if the folks sheltering my kids couldn't feed them - unlikely - my kids would also have food to eat. That also gave me a little more freedom from fear in making my decision, because I could handle pretty much everything else. (I suppose the other issue was health insurance, but my ex had them on his job and is required to keep them insured until they are 18, so that resolved another potential fear.) |
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