Going Solo   

Freelancing is not for the fainthearted, but it can be an exhilarating way of life. Doing it in the Caribbean doesn't hurt, either.

I WAS ON THE CARIBBEAN island of Montserrat a couple of years ago, covering life after the volcano and sniffing around for other interesting stories. I found one: an elegant restaurant on a mountain that was in a tent, no less--sort of Ali Baba in the rainforest.

The owners were setting up for dinner. When I requested an interview, they asked whom I represented. I replied that I wasn't sure where I would place the story, but that I wrote for a variety of publications and named a few of them.

"Oh, you mean you freelance," one of the owners said disapprovingly. "Well, yes," I gulped, feeling suddenly like I was standing in the woods, naked. When they mumbled something about not wanting to waste their time, I decided I wouldn't waste mine either, and bumped my way back down the hill.

It hit me then that I was really on my own. No press card, no lawyers waiting in the wings, no institutional credibility behind me. All I had was my clip book (which I don't haul around), my (hopefully) professional demeanor and my word.

The freelancer is a loner who does what he or she does without a support system. Once you leave a journalism job to freelance, there are no more paychecks, benefits, pension contributions, 401K matches. The anxiety of the first day of school, heading off to college or walking down the aisle for the first time pales by comparison.

The freelance writer is the circus performer of journalism: You walk a tightrope and pull tricks out of your hat at the same time. When you fall, you can be sure your friends will all be around you, looking at you splattered on the ground, shaking their heads, muttering, "We told her so."

Nevertheless, you can still pursue a do-whatever-you-want-when-you-want-it writing career. And you can, to a certain extent, build yourself a safety net. (You can also change your phone number so that your old friends won't know how to reach you.)

The name of the game is freedom and self-determination, and that's why many people leave secure, comfortable jobs to freelance. The freedom provides a thrill, and each success brings with it an incredible sense of accomplishment for having done it alone. Around each corner can be a new adventure, a new writing possibility, a new venue. It's especially good for those of us in the "twilight of our careers." My current theory: Don't burn out. Find your niche and burn more brightly.

Since I started freelancing full time in 1997, I've written for magazines and newspapers in the United States, around the Caribbean and abroad, not to mention news services. I've done promotional materials, brochures, fliers and a newsletter. I've written a book, updated guidebooks, and contributed to several Web sites. I'm now contemplating a couple other books and keeping my eyes open.

The beauty part is that you can work whenever you want. Unfortunately, that will probably be all the time. When Betty Friedan wrote that work expands to fit the time available, she was referring to housework, but she might as well have been describing freelancing.

Forget about sleeping. I have found that the hunt for story ideas is endless. You'll awaken from a fitful sleep, groping for a pencil to write down yet another possibility for publication.

When you leave the newsroom each night, you can forget the job. With freelancing, you don't leave the office. In fact you probably sleep, eat and bathe in the same room or very nearby. (One recent night I fell asleep at the computer, but continued to type. True story.)

The hardest thing about freelancing is the business of it, not the actual reporting and writing. You must be the concept person, the sales and marketing director for your work, the production line, the accountant--even the collection agency.
This little freelance "company" you set up will have none of the benefits you've had for so many years, and you will most likely have to cut out some, like disability insurance. Or you could move back with your parents (God forbid!) or your kids (even worse!). Each person will have a different comfort level when it comes to things like these.

Of course the best safety net is a healthy bank account, or at least enough to pay the bills for a few months. This amount will vary according to your lifestyle, other family income and the number of people you support.

The key is to establish your bottom line and then consider how to make that much. This is the key part of freelancing, and the hardest. Many freelancers say they've never made as much as they did at their old day jobs; others make more.

You'll need to invest in a certain amount of equipment that your employer used to provide. Now you'll have to be a whiz at computers, photos, scanners and so on. Things go wrong, and you're alone. The strap on my new Nikon camera broke on one of my journeys, smashing my telephoto lens (fortunately not a Nikon). I couldn't replace it or find any stand-in camera for several days of traveling, and part of me wished I could wire the home office for help.

But once you're set up, you'll be ready to get down to the business of finding jobs and get some money rolling in.

Some ideas: line up regular gigs like crafting a column for a small publication, writing regularly for Web sites, churning out press releases for a local company. Many businesses today are "outsourcing" their workloads to cut back on full-time workers, so the opportunities are there. Writing newsletters for companies or organizations can be lucrative.

To come up with a basic income, I've actually continued part time as a daily journalist. Living on a fairly remote island--Nevis in the West Indies--I write from the Caribbean for Reuters News Service, filing stories to the Miami bureau when events like hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and political campaigns occur. I'm also now an "island correspondent" for a regional paper, the Daily Herald, a sizable and dependable daily published in Dutch St. Maarten. Sometimes the stories overlap, and a Herald story can be spun for Reuters and vice versa.

As a one-person bureau, I had to find someone to deliver the Herald on Nevis and outlets to sell it. While the paper is supposed to arrive by plane at 8:45 each morning, sometimes bad weather causes delays, and I get stuck delivering it, too, running from store to store, counting out copies, ending up covered in ink. If the papers don't get to the stores and the readers, so much for my job security. This is the freelance life.

My other regular gig is a travel column I pitched to a magazine that didn't even cover the subject. But it is circulated among people who have big bucks, and I knew they must travel. So I came up with two years' worth of column ideas, such as "buying your own island" and "high-adventure trips." I got the assignment.

Networking is a key to finding work. The travel column I landed through my sister-in-law, also a former daily journalist who now freelances. I met another woman journalist who lives on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands while covering a news story. We stay in contact by e-mail. In the past year, she's recommended me for a couple of jobs, and I've done the same for her. If one of us is oversubscribed, we pass the overflow along to the other.

Don't hesitate to rekindle contacts with former colleagues. Let the journalism diaspora work for you.

Networking aside, there's always the hard way to line up assignments, the query letter. Luckily, many of them can be sent today via e-mail, which speeds up what used to be an agonizing process. Editors tend to respond much more quickly to e-mail, somewhat reducing the anxiety of waiting. I average one query a week, though sometimes I do several at one time. Probably half of them elicit no response. Others end up in an assignment, and some lead to an ongoing relationship.

The business side is what takes patience. Last year I wrote a story for an editor whom I had queried. She called me the next day in a panic: A story had fallen through, and she wondered if I could step in and file a piece right away about Caribbean houses. I pumped out a 2,500-word article and overnighted photos to her in the United Kingdom in 36 hours.

The next day, I got an e-mail from the editor saying that she had resigned, and all writers should contact the publisher for payment. Needless to say, I've never seen the story, and I'm still waiting for the check.

In fact, there are some people who seem to take the "free" in freelance literally. Those people drop rapidly from my list. I try to find people I like who treat writers with respect.

If you have made a name for yourself, it will be easier to start up a flourishing freelance operation, especially if you can tout yourself as a specialist in a subject or geographic area. Living where I do, I sell myself as a Caribbean expert, and focus mostly on travel.

If all else fails, you can bartend to earn more cash. I have, and have found it to be a great source of stories as well as income.

One thing to remember: The freedom is great, but working in a vacuum can be tough. Without the camaraderie of a newsroom, you're left to your own devices--no one to help with mental blocks or elusive leads. Now I just read the story aloud to myself and pretend someone else wrote it. But staying in touch with fellow journalists by e-mail does help.

Speaking of which, it's hard to imagine freelancing full time in pre-Internet times, when researching a story meant trips to the local library, dozens of expensive phone calls and months wasted while queries languished, at best, on some editor's desk or, at worst, in a circular file.

The Internet has probably opened more avenues for freelancers than anything else, ever. There are dozens of Web sites, e-mail newsletters and places to advertise yourself, not to mention the ability the Net provides to research most any topic in minutes. No matter where you're based, you can write about anything, anywhere, thanks to the Web.

I've researched several stories totally online. For others, I've posted my assignment on a writer's Web site and waited for the information to come to me.

One site,www.writersmarkets.com, sends out e-mail newsletters filled with information about what magazines are seeking. There are many other helpful sites, like www.inkspot.com, www.journalismjobs.com and www.pageonelit. com.

Once you get started, the key is persistence. Eventually you'll land an assignment, and that will lead to another assignment, and pretty soon you've built up a rapport with an editor or two. Once that happens, you can pitch more and more stories, and the editors will often bite, or at least have a good reason why they won't. Sometimes they might even call you, and the day that happens, you'll be euphoric.

A background in daily journalism is a plus. When I got one of my first assignments, the magazine editor said to me, "I love working with daily journalists. They get it done well and get it done fast."

I've relied on the skills I've always used. I look at the Caribbean as "my beat." I've tried to cultivate sources here: island tourism directors, museum directors, hotel associations, political leaders. You could do the same thing with the medical field, gardening, sports.
Most freelance writers, whether they cover travel or health or food or business, will tell you that the only way to survive is to leverage story topics. Some writers talk about how they've dramatically increased their earnings by rewriting a story repeatedly, tailoring it for different markets. You can find noncompeting publications in noncompeting geographical areas, and then you just sell, sell, sell.

Hitting the overseas markets is a good way to stimulate repeat sales. Michael Sedge, a former freelancer, lists hundreds of magazines virtually unknown in the United States in his book, "The Writer's and Photographer's Guide to Global Markets." There are magazines you probably don't read regularly like "Emirates Woman," published in Dubai; "Cuisine," in New Zealand; "The Countryman," in the United Kingdom. Not as many of these magazines use e-mail, but the numbers are growing. You will most likely have to fax them.

Of course, you'll need a little exchange chart to make sense of the various currencies you'll encounter. I've put together a short conversion list for checking on payments: for example, one Rand equals about 15 cents, a yen is less than a penny.

I haven't gotten paid yet in yen, but I did get a check in British pounds. I thought I'd gotten $500 U.S., until I received the bank statement and saw I had deposited more than $800. It was a pleasant surprise and opened my eyes to the nuances of global freelancing.

And it helped me walk along that tightrope a little bit longer.