Adventures in Freelancing

In December of last year, before Christmas, I quit my job, left my home town of Wellington, New Zealand and moved to London. My plan was to begin a new, full-time career in freelance writing. This seemed like an obvious match: in the late 2000s, writing was pretty much the only thing I did. Although fully aware that I'd never written in a commercial or professional environment, I still went for it. I moved to a new country with no source of income, armed with only one thing: a writing portfolio filled with short stories about video games, fake pinball trivia and ironic H.P. Lovecraft homages. This is what is known in sarcastic circles as an excellent idea. Or, in medical terms, a classic case of Fyfe Syndrome.

A brief aside: most people were encouraging or excited when I said I was going to do this. But when I was boarding the plane to London and waving goodbye to my family, someone grabbed my arm. It was an old woman, no more than five feet, who told me in a hoarse, urgent voice that I was going to be eaten alive - not by the big city, but by a wolf. I told her to get lost and she disappeared into the crowd.

In all seriousness, five months have now gone by and I can report that my experience of breaking into freelance writing has been what you'd diplomatically refer to as "educational", "challenging, but in, like, a good way, you know?" or just simply as "an experience." Despite proving myself something less than successful at the job, I have, as you'd hope, learned a lot about what it means to be a freelance writer. Knowing how valuable such advice is from someone who's been trying something new for five months, please find four important lessons about freelance writing below.

FOUR BASIC THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A FREELANCE WRITER

#1. BEING ABLE TO SELL YOURSELF IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING ABLE TO WRITE WELL

In many ways it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are. Even if you are demonstrably great, generally people do not simply come to you with work. If you want something, you have to ask for it. Eloquence might make the job of pitching easier, but fundamentally writing is a different skill than being able to market and promote your services.

Not only do you need to be good at selling your ideas, but you need to be doing it all the time. Pitches, even those from great, commercially successful writers, are rejected constantly for reasons both fair and unfair. Don't rely on just one good idea: have dozens. Have infinite ideas. Breed an infinite number of idea-babies and send them to their death.

#2. BE OKAY WITH BEING ALONE

Writing is not a 9 to 5 job, it is a 24/7 job. Writing is as much about thinking and being alive as it is typing words. And because creativity seems to rely in large part on the right neurons firing in your brain, you feel inspired and write well at weird times, and feel like shit and write as shittily as a shit in a shit at other weird times. To be productive, you'll have to make sacrifices: telling your friends that you're too busy to talk or hang out, not being fully present at a party or dinner or date, and admitting that what you really want in that moment is some paper and a pencil and some alone time. Romantically speaking, such a sacrifice is a noble one, made as it is for the sake of creative expression.

When things are going well, you're lonely because you want to be. Not so in the Bad Times, during which you cannot write well, cannot sell well, have no ideas, no contact with editors, leaving you with just a blank document and a keyboard, and every key you press only manages to make an ugly thing uglier.

This is when you're desperate to be around other people, whether for inspiration or companionship or distraction or whatever. But your friends probably don't schedule their availability around your creative mood swings, and so when you do decide to have a social life, sometimes you can't. It is in the Bad Times, when you are a writer who cannot write, that you will feel the loneliest.

#3. HAVE SOMETHING THAT IS JUST YOURS

Have a creative outlet that belongs exclusively to you, which is a conduit for all your weirdness that is not commercially viable. This is especially important if your sensibility is naturally inclined towards the strange, the personal or otherwise inaccessible. Very likely, there won't be any money in doing so: it'll be a blog or a Twitter account. You might say that this is wasting your time and energy on a thing that pays you zero dollars, which is fully true.

The benefits, though, are not financial. As a freelance writer, the things that you say are delayed for weeks or months at a time and subject to an edit process you're not privy to. I really believe it's healthy to have some outlet through which you can say exactly what you want to say and at any time. Otherwise, you are writing for a living without ever being able to express what you honestly want to express.

#4. BE PREPARED

This advice is best illustrated with a real life example. Earlier this year, I pitched a feature idea to a London-based magazine that should go unnamed. The pitch was rejected, but luck turned out to be on my side and very much not on some other people's side: the magazine's editor contacted me to say that another writer had initiated an article for the publication, but had been called away on account of a sudden family emergency. In his absence, I was asked to complete the article, either because the editor took pity me or because, as he'd originally said, he genuinely liked my writing.

The assignment was a feature profile of a "creative collective" which had offices in London's uber-hip Shoreditch. This collective, which consisted of notable London artists, filmmakers and graphic designers, had technically been a going concern for a year but had flown under the radar until now. I organised an interview with some of the key personnel as soon as was convenient, which turned out to be a Tuesday night.

I arrived at their offices around eight p.m., and was greeted by one of the collective's co-founders, Katy. (Not her real name.) What I didn't know at the time was that over the last year, many of her co-founding members had dropped out, without publicly stating the reason why. Had I known that in advance, I'd have been able to approach the subject with some diplomacy. Instead, one of my first questions to Katy was about a co-founder named Shaun (not his real name either), a well-known theatre and film producer in London. Katy informed me tersely that Shaun was no longer part of the collective. I stumbled a bit and offered up a question about the collective's philosophy that even I knew at the time wasn't very good. "Well," said Katy with disdain, "you're confusing two very important concepts there." I nodded and listened to her lecture while she looked disappointed with me.

A little later, Katy gave me a tour around the collective's creative space. I half-heartedly examined the workspace, idly playing around with objects on the tables and so forth, and peeked inside a shut closet. As I opened the door, I heard Katy scream "No!" A giant black wolf burst out from behind the door and I was thrown to the ground. The wolf looked me over and issued a howl. "No," Katy pleaded, "don't hurt him, Shaun, don't hurt him." Immediately, I got to my feet and booked it towards the stairwell. The offices were on the sixth floor of the building, and I'd made it down to the fifth before the wolf somehow pounced onto the landing before me, turned, and growled. I threw my laptop bag at the wolf and sprinted back up the stairs.

It's a cliche, but the best way to kill a werewolf is indeed the fabled silver bullet: it's the fastest way to introduce silver into the bloodstream. I hadn't even considered this eventuality at the time, though, and had no silver with me. If I'd been better prepared, I would have: I would have noticed that it was a full moon the night of my interview and taken precautions. But I was sloppy, I didn't prepare, and that's how I found myself being chased up a stairwell by a werewolf.

I felt the wolf's hot breath on my back all the way up the stairs. I made it to the roof and tried to shut the stairwell door behind me, but the wolf jutted out its paw and stopped me. I struggled for a moment but he flung the door back and me with it. I quickly picked myself up and ran to the edge of the roof, hoping, but without any sure reason to hope, that I was heading towards a fire escape. As I neared the ledge, the werewolf circled around and stopped me in my tracks. I froze, and in that moment the werewolf pounced and pushed me to the floor. I tried to hold back the beast's salivating jaw, knowing that if he got me between its teeth it didn't matter what happened next. The wolf raised its right claw and slashed me across the face. I lost my grip and fell back hard. The werewolf strutted atop me, eyeing me carefully, and then raised itself on its hind legs in the light of the full moon and howled. In that moment I saw my opportunity. I pulled back my right leg and kicked the creature square in its stomach. The wolf stumbled and tipped over the edge of the roof. Its howl, moments earlier the bragging of a vicious predator, turned immediately to terror, and then, with a dull thump as the body hit the pavement, to silence.

I made my way down to the street. Shaun lay on the street in his human form, with a crowd gathering around his naked and bloodied body. "Let me through," I said. I knelt down beside Shaun and, weakly, he reached out to me. I took his hand in both of mine.

"I didn't mean to hurt anyone," Shaun whispered to me.

"I know," I told him. "I know."

"I'm sorry," he said, and his head rolled back until his cheek braced the asphalt.

"It's okay," I said. "Let go. You can let go."

Shaun nodded, almost imperceptibly, and expired on the sidewalk. Once I knew he was really gone, I released his hands. I took a bus home.

One for the Rats

To begin with, you're always the underdog.

You are betrayed, set up, cast out, left for dead. You are called a thief, an assassin, a false prophet. All thanks to the forces of Evil, or, in more mundane cases, Some Dick. The only thing you can do - the only reason you even exist - is to put right what has gone wrong, save the world, and kill a million people who want to murder you. And you will succeed every time, because you are That Guy.

You are the best person. Relative to the rest of your world, you are stronger, faster, smarter, more independent and certainly more important. The world constantly rests on your shoulders and you never let it down. You are naturally proficient in hacking, lock picking, athletics, acrobatics and all forms of weaponry and combat. You can regenerate from any injury. You have supermodel good looks. You never need to worry about eating or sleeping or exercising or going to the bathroom. You are never sad. You can teleport, leap into the minds of others, bend time, see through walls and shoot rats from your fingers. And hell hath no fury like a man who shoots rats from his fingers scorned.

And yet...

And yet when I'm playing the role of Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, for instance, a guy who can do all of the above, I do none of it. Superhuman Corvo Attano, framed for the murder of his cool Empress girlfriend and thrown to the rats (literally, there's a Rat Plague), is going to clear his name and avenge her death, for sure, but he does not unleash hell with his time-bending powers and kill everyone standing in his way. My Corvo Attano lurks in dumpsters and hides from maids under dining room tables. He enters buildings by crawling in the window and waits in sewers while guard dogs sniff by. He eats things that he finds in abandoned, plague-ridden homes. He may even spy on a woman bathing through the keyhole of a door. He'll steal from people, read their diaries and eavesdrop on their conversations but won't kill them and in fact tries to avoid them entirely. He covers his face with a mask and if he is ever spotted, people jump and scream. This is my Corvo Attano: more rat than rat lord.

I have been this guy before. In Deus Ex, J.C. Denton can explode rockets with his mind but he lives in air vents, steals from ATMs and hacks into office workers' email while hiding under their desk. In Bioshock Infinite, Booker DeWitt commands the elements and can also shoot animals from his fingers, but his diet consists exclusively of hot dogs he finds in the trash. The nameless hero of System Shock 2 has psychic powers but most of the time, basically, he beats monkeys with a wrench. Garrett, the eponymous master Thief, can steal anything from anywhere, but if some medieval rent-a-cop spots him, he'll run away and hide in a closet. He also gets his clock cleaned by someone called the "Woodsy Lord" - which, come on.

In the vocabulary of Bioshock Infinite: constants and variables. All these guys are the same person, though the circumstances are always different: a man (and it pretty much is always a man) possessed of terrific, otherworldly powers, but who foregoes those powers to go through life in the slowest, least confrontational, least dignified way imaginable.

Corvo Attano, J.C. Denton, Adam Jensen, Booker and Jack from Bioshock - all these guys are Fox Mulder. Mulder, at once, has everything and nothing - and doesn't appreciate the things he has. He's got a cool job, a cool apartment, looks like David Duchovny circa 1995 and has Dana Scully as a friend, yet he has no social life, no love life, a porn addiction and an obsession with a ludicrous quest for the paranormal that will leave him unsatisfied and unfulfilled, much like The X-Files' audience.

EDDIE

I just think it's funny. I was born a loser, but you're one by choice.

MULDER

On what do you base that astute assessment?

EDDIE

Experience. You should live a little. Treat yourself. God knows I would. If I were you.

Of course it doesn't have to be that way. All the games I've mentioned, and many, many others, present a clear and significant choice between an action and a stealth path. Corvo Attano can throw rats and hurricanes at people while he leaps over a brothel on a motorcycle, sure. All of these guys can, to varying degrees. The option to lose patience, let loose and become the kid from Looper is always there.

Yet I never do that. I'm the guy who will check every room, sneak past every guard, use the tranquilizer darts and pepper spray and find every audio diary and password. I'll go through every dumpster, attic and sewer to do it. I'll never touch a rocket launcher and if the alarm goes off once, I'll reload. In many ways, the game approves.

The characters of Deus Ex and Dishonored - the righteous, moral ones - will admonish their protagonist for killing any more than is necessary. The path of caution, investigation and exploration inevitably yields the greatest rewards: the cache of ammo and supplies tucked away in a corner, a hidden audio diary, some piece of lore - and, on a meta level, extra achievements and experience points. Face-to-face combat, too, can quickly spiral out of control - J.C. Denton is more or less a god, but two or three guys rushing him at once qualifies as an emergency. The grotesque menageries encountered in System Shock and Thief make any contact with enemies unappealing.

All these games have some mechanical incentive to play it slow and non-violent. Even beyond that, though, the quixotic, self-destructive path of Booker DeWitt, Garrett, Fox Mulder and These Guys feels thematically appropriate to the stories being told. What these games all have in common is that you are exploring a world in decline - and you are alone. Bioshock's underwater Rapture, when you get there, is already a world destroyed, and you are literally picking up the pieces, listening to the voices of people long since dead dictating autobiographies that they don't yet realise will turn out to be tragedies. Likewise, on the spaceships of System Shock, so bleak and so empty, the prospect of talking to even one person, to even one human soul, is hugely significant - and your enemies know this, and use it against you. In Bioshock Infinite, you witness, and cause, the death of an impossibly idealistic city in the sky. The cities of Deus Ex are gross, grimy and unhappy and every villainous motivation ever ascribed to the government is true. The homeless of Dishonored are eaten alive by rats.

The worlds are depressing. And so, ultimately, are these guys: the big heroes, the J.C. Dentons and Corvo Attanos. They save the world, every time, but their stories always seem to end in tragedy, or at least a bittersweet victory at a deeply personal cost. J.C. Denton, Adam Jensen and Bioshock's Jack are scientific creations, built for a specific, violent function, who manage to subvert their destiny but only into a kind of nihilist unmaking. Garrett's moment of triumph is saving a world that doesn't give a shit about him, and thus he is left huddling outside in the snow, his eye freshly ripped from its socket. Let's not even start with Booker DeWitt, arguably the worst human ever to star in a video game, if you exclude from the conversation the fact that all video game stars are mass murderers. And Corvo Attano, like a lot of these guys, has no voice, and cannot respond to overtures of romance and friendship. He can only communicate through violence. Being a rat is all he knows.

Objectively, they have it all, they have absolutely everything, and yet they end up with nothing. There's no final reward waiting for these guys. Even the player, who arguably cares about them more than anyone else, will promptly ditch them for somebody else. They are lonely.

Well, this sounds lame, but they have each other. These guys belong to a select fraternity. When I play Dishonored and Bioshock Infinite and I'm told for the first time that I need to find and enter a passcode, I think give me a break. The code - I never need to even check - is 0451, a Fahrenheit 451 reference included in System Shock in 1994 and which since found its way into almost every game made by the same group of people, or into the sequels to the games they created. 0451 has transcended its origin as a literary reference and become a kind of DNA marker; a signifier that all of the games which bear that mark belong to the same family: the stealth/action-but-really-stealth game about a ruined world and a lonely hero. In five years since I first wrote about 0451, the code's turned up in Bioshock 2, Bioshock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored. Its presence, at this point, is predictable but not unwelcome. It says that even though you're in a new place - Rapture, Columbia, whatever the city in Dishonored was called - and in a new body - Jack, Booker DeWitt, Adam Jensen, Corvo Attano - you have been here before. You have been this guy before. And you know how to do this.

Is This My Bloody Valentine

I took the above photo - maybe the best I've ever taken, though there's another strong contender at the end of this post - of My Bloody Valentine in concert. It's important to note that this picture greatly overemphasises the transcendence of their stage show.

On March 13, I went to see My Bloody Valentine at the Hammerstein Apollo, a London institution that has hosted countless legendary acts, from My Bloody Valentine all the way down to other ones. My move to London has paid off hugely in that it's finally possible for me to experience stuff like this on a regular basis. I come from New Zealand, where a typical Friday night out is making two cows fight each other in the town hall. Sometimes they don't even fight; they just stand there, and it's very upsetting.

Bilinda Butcher is the first to take the stage at the Apollo, and greets the crowd with a sweetly unassuming "Hi." That is the peak of the band's engagement with the audience. The MBV live show is at once both abrasive and boring, like if getting punched in the face could soothe you to sleep.

Kevin Shields plays like he's wondering how to fill out his timesheet after the show. Butcher is incredibly still throughout, stopping between songs to pin her hair back into place, and looks shyly pleased being there. Colm Ó Cíosóig is interesting in that he basically looks like the Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane himself, the master of madness. Long songs and whispered lyrics drone over the audience softly, alternating with aggressively loud wall-of-sound blasts drawn out interminably. The audience sways, cheers and scrambles to protect their already plugged ears, but invariably checks Facebook on their phones. 

In the crowd around me, one very enthusiastic fellow has thrown himself into ecstasy-fuelled, Barrel of Monkeys-inspired dancing. To my right, two platinum blond girls stare each down and wave their hands in complex patterns in front of the other's face; what I assume is a duelling Stevie Nicks thing. Those girls are repeatedly intruded upon by an older guy who looks like the first thing that comes to mind when you read the phrase "cartoon dirtbag". 

Nearby, a skinhead is making out hungrily and at length with his petite girlfriend. When, at one point, he needs a free hand, he hurls a plastic cup half full of beer into the audience. My friend Harry, whom I'm at the show with, hits him lightly on the shoulder and shoots a reproaching glance. The skinhead, his black, doll's eyes raging, sizes Harry up. He has a rod pierced through his ear, so he is clearly some kind of Satanist. After a tense pause, he spits out "Don't you fucking tell me what to do." Over the music, I yell to Harry, "I'VE GOT YOUR BACK." The skinhead turns around again and looks at me like he knows I'm eventually going to write this paragraph. We never did fight him.

Late in the show, it occurred to me that I was seeing the ultimate shoegaze band in concert, but I hadn't gazed at my shoes once. What an oversight!