Bipolar indeed..
When I started getting semi-serious about my professional life, back around ’95 or so, it was in tech. I sort of snuck in through the back door of the 90’s tech boom, first as an under-the-radar coder for Lockheed Martin and then a UNIX sysadmin for Verizon Communications. Did a lot of computer geeking, made more than a few dollars, and gradually discovered that I didn’t want to be doing that at 40. I’d dreamed of being a writer since high school and never found the nerve to really throw everything I had at it. Turning 30 in 2001 forced me to face that. So I walked out of tech and leaped headlong into the dream.
I started a copywriting business, did some tech consulting work occasionally to bring in quick cash, and gradually made it work. The first year I ate a lot of beans and barely paid the rent. Every year since then I’ve done a bit better than the year before, and by 2007 I was making almost as much money as I did in my tech days. Not bad when you consider that, statistically, only a few percent of working writers make more than $20K a year.
Writing can be a strange life. We meet weird people, learn weird things. We learn to walk this awkward line where we occasionally make a difference to people but mostly sit on the sidelines, telling the stories of people actually in the trenches. Like I told Monica and her firefighter husband Scott that night at dinner, us writers do what we do because we don’t have the guts to do what Scott does. At the same time, writers tend to get free license to be weird. We’re expected to be odd, which can be fun. Unfortunately I’m too conservative for my own good sometimes, so I rarely exploit that.
I think the pressures of running a business keep me in check. I don’t have the time to do the Hunter Thompson thing – I have clients to keep happy, marketing to do, invoices to print and mail, finances to manage, growth to manage. And it’s frustrating and exhausting sometimes, with a smattering of outright annoying from time to time. But there’s still no line of work I’d rather be doing.
It’s all something that I’m glad Kristi understands. Not many people do. She’ll never know how much that means to me.
(By the way, we’re launching a second copywriting website to build a larger West Coast clientele. Watch us grow at B2BWords.com!)