So now that you’ve seen how I work the Magic Hour and spend too much time talking to my cats, it’s time for our first official peek at a day in the life of another freelancer. Kicking things off is the very awesome Amy Palanjian. Amy and I bonded instantly when we were hired as assistant editors at the now-dead Organic Style in 2004. The magazine was run on such a shoestring budget that instead of having cubicles, we shared a conference table with two other editors — ensuring that we would either get entirely sick of each other or become best friends. Spoiler alert: It was the latter. 

I’ve decided that in addition to hearing how these freelance writers spend their day, you’re also going to want to hear a little bit about what kind of work they do and how they got where they are — so keep reading for that conversation with Amy after her daily routine.

Here is Amy:

Name: Amy Palanjian

Freelance Job Description: Writer, editor, author (of So Pretty! Felt, out this month from Chronicle Books, and So Pretty! Crochet) and sometime recipe developer.

Location: Des Moines, IA

And this is how she spent February 14, 2013: 

• 6-7 am: Woke up before my daughter, so I jumped in the shower while I had the chance. Checked my email, heard her talking to herself, so went in to start our day. (Some days, when I have the steam, I get up at 5 and either work out or get some work done. This was not one of those days.)

• 7-7:30am: Made cocoa pancakes (for Valentine’s Day!) and had breakfast with Linden. My husband (he’s a professor) worked upstairs.

• 7:30-9am: Play time with Linden. We play with blocks, I sit behind her while she walks while holding onto furniture in case she starts to fall, and we read books. Then it’s nap time.

• 9-10:45am:My husband stays with Linden while I go downtown for a taste panel (I’m covering for an editor-less magazine). We try summery recipes—I do not recommend watermelon in February. I check on my stash of props for two upcoming shoots for Do It Yourself magazine and start to get organized for my afternoon run-through.

• 10:45am-1:00pm: Husband heads to the office; I have Linden time and lunch. She plays by herself for a while, so I start fleshing out a project idea for an editor.

• 1-2:15pm: Linden naps and I look for a retro cooler for a market work assignment that is otherwise done, respond to a few emails from editors, and send a proposal for another project off to another editor. 

• 2:15pm: Linden wakes up, so I get her ready for her sitter.

• 2:45-4:30pm: I belong to a babysitting coop, so a member and her son come over to watch Linden while I go off to my run-through. It goes well! 

• 4:30-6:00pm: I give Linden her dinner, a bath, and get her ready for bed. She goes to bed at 6, which is as lovely and remarkable as it sounds.

• 6:00-7:00pm: Husband comes home, I make dinner, and we eat it. (Tonight was cheesy grits topped with sauteed mushrooms, chard, and peas. Quick and tasty.) 

• 7:00-9:00pm: Clear out my inbox, spend more time on the cooler hunt, and glance at a draft of a story that’s due soon. Spend some time working on a quilt and watching TV. With wine.

[The super cute view from Amy's office.]

VA: Give us the back story: What inspired you to become a freelance writer and how long have you been doing this? 

AP: I’ve dabbled in freelance work for about the past five years—first as a way to jump to a more senior job when I needed a way to get experience that my day job wasn’t able to provide, and then as a way to pay the rent between magazine closures (there have been three…they were not my fault). Oh and I also wrote two books (So Pretty! Crochet and So Pretty! Felt) on the side of office gigs because I had the chance and you (or at least I) don’t say no to a book deal. But these days, being freelance is my career as I chose to leave a steady office job after my daughter was born last May. I wanted to decide how I spent my days and to be able to work on a broader range of stories than I was able to in that job. You will not be shocked to learn that I do not miss my cubicle. I do, however, miss my fancy corporate chair. I see my former coworkers regularly since I work with them regularly, which is a big plus.

VA: What is your most favorite project to date? 

AP: The books were really fun because I got to work with really talented contributors. Otherwise, the answer to this changes each month—the two stories that I recently produced for Do It Yourself magazine that I mentioned above were totally fun. I came up with the projects, made them all, sourced all of the props and styled on set. I’ve done all of those things in the past, but never all at the same time, which was a pretty awesome opportunity.

VA: Do you have a niche or do you consider yourself more of a generalist? (And why did you choose one or the other?) 

AP: I tend to go back and forth between food (I was a food editor in my most recent office job) and craft (see above about writing two books). I was also the deputy editor at now-defunct ReadyMade, so I have a lot of experience in finding and working with people who make things. That said, I also love writing stories about parenting, homes, and gardening, which it seems would make me a generalist, with some specialties. 

VA: What is your favorite part of the job? 

AP:  I love that things are always changing and that I don’t always know what I’ll be working on from one week to the next. It’s hard to get bored when things are always new. I also feel much more efficient than when I worked in an office—I am much more aware of the need to use my time wisely—and I love that I get to spend my days with my daughter. I’ve gotten to see all of the small milestones, such as the first time that she purposely reached for something or the first time she walked herself along the walls in the hallway to come find me. (Also the first time she unrolled a roll of toilet paper and tried to eat it…) I feel incredibly lucky.

VA: What is the worst part of the job? 

AP: Not knowing what I’ll be working on from one week to the next! It can be a little stressful when I’m behind with my monthly income accrual and I’m not sure what else might pan out. Also, at the moment, it’s highly likely that I’m trying to do too much and working too many weekends, which I know isn’t sustainable for very much longer. 

VA: What do you wish you had known starting out, so you always make sure to tell other people? 

AP: That it can be really scary to be in charge of your time and your income—and that if you have kids, having a deep bench of reliable childcare, even if you only need it occasionally, is pretty key. I recently upped the amount of babysitting I have each week to 10 hours, and I think it will do both Linden and I a lot of good. I can knock out a bunch of work and focus more completely on her when I’m with her, and she gets to interact with and learn from other people.

VA:What are you still trying to figure out about this writing business? 

AP: Even though I worked at magazines for nearly a decade, it’s always hard to know how internal systems work at any given place. So pitching ideas is a challenge. As much as you might pitch and have good ideas, if a place has a huge inventory or has a convoluted approval system, you might wait forever to get an assignment (or be told that they are passing). That can be frustrating. Oh also, revisions. Revisions can be a totally unpredictable time suck.

VA: Probably the two biggest fears about freelance writing that I hear are: How do you have enough discipline to work for yourself? And, how do you maintain any work/life balance when you work for yourself, at home? 

AP: Discipline: I like to do a good job and I am a stickler for deadlines. I want my editors to like me and want to continue working with me, so not doing the work isn’t really an option. When I have work to do, I structure my day around it and get it done. That’s sort of the deal. I like my work so it’s not about discipline—it’s about trying to be good at what I do.

Work/life balance: This is harder for me now than it ever has been. It’s tough to feel like every moment that I’m not taking care of Linden, I need to be working. But I also know that this phase of my life won’t last forever so I’m doing my best to be realistic with what I can take on, to get enough sleep, and to put down my computer for at least an hour before bed so that I don’t have insomnia. This doesn’t always happen, but it’s my goal. I hope this improves when I have a better childcare support system in place, which will hopefully happen soon.

VA: Where do you see yourself, writing-wise, in five years? 

AP: I can’t even imagine what I’ll be able with a whole school-day worth of hours to myself! Honestly, I’ve never been a long-term goal setter and that’s worked for me so far. My career is so much different than it was when I started out in this industry and there’s no way that I could have anticipated all that I’ve gotten to do. I’m taking it year by year, business plan by business plan.

You can pre-order So Pretty! Felt right here.

PS. Want to share your Day In the Freelance Life? Email it to me on virginiasolesmith [at] gmail [dot] com, subject: Day In the Freelance Life Submission. Try to follow this format and include a picture or two of yourself, your work environment, what have you.

Just a quick one because I wanted to share this compelling infographic designed by the National Women’s Law Center. Per the email they sent around:

[Last week] Senator Harkin and Representative Miller introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013. This bill would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, then provide for automatic adjustments linked to changes in the cost of living. The bill would also gradually raise the minimum wage for tipped workers, which has been frozen at just $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years. And let’s not forget President Obama’s words of support for increasing the minimum wage in his most recent State of the Union address. 

The bottom line is that minimum wage is a critical issue for women. Today, women are the vast majority of minimum wage earners across the country, which is one of the reasons that they still regularly earn less than men. Raising the federal minimum wage would boost the earning power of millions of women and help close the gender wage gap.

Help spread the word about this critical issue by sharing our graphic on Facebook today.

Sometimes I get a little nervous when we decide to make a social justice issue into a “women’s issue,” because I’m afraid that means we’ll all take it less seriously. Case in point: Everyone keeps yelling about how Marissa Mayer’s decision to get all her work-from-home employees into the Yahoo! office is so bad for working mothers. It absolutely is (and the hypocrisy of her call — while installing a nursery for her own baby in her office but failing to offer an onsite daycare for any other employees — boggles the mind). But it’s also terrible for working fathers, many of whom enjoy seeing and parenting their children on a daily basis, and frankly, for anyone who values their work/life balance. Neither children nor ovaries are prerequisites for wanting some control over your schedule.

And so, with minimum wage, I want to acknowledge that there are millions of men struggling to make ends meet on these paychecks. But it is striking how many more women are impacted because women are more likely to be in the kinds of jobs that society has decided just aren’t worth paying more. I spent last week on assignment for a story (that I’ll be able to tell you more about when it runs later this year) about women who have worked these kinds of jobs for years, yet they still can’t feed their own kids without food stamps and other government programs — and often, not even with that assistance. Yet they are doing exhausting and important work, involving significant emotional labor: Caring for our children and elderly, tending to our homes, and/or feeding us.

There is something very wrong with that picture. So I hope you’ll read up on the minimum wage issue (NWLC has a great resource page; the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has a good fact sheet on how the gender wage gap is not getting any smaller). And please, share the graphic, and tell your senators to support the increase.

“Exposure” is just a fancy word for “free.” As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a fan of working for free, although there are a few respectable instances where you might decide that it makes sense and exposure is one of them. Ironic case in point: I let that very blog post about not working for free be re-posted to Medium and Ed2010 for free – because those sites are run by colleagues who I like and respect and because I know they have lots of freelancers among their readership, so the piece could reach people who would find it helpful.

There is a big difference, of course, between my republishing a blog post — something I already wrote for free just because I damn well pleased — on a couple of indie sites (one of which is a nonprofit that mentors young’uns in this industry)… and a major media company asking an established writer to rewrite an already-published-and-paid-for article for them, gratis. If one magazine wants to publish something previously published by another magazine, they are supposed to pay both original magazine and the writer (depending on the terms of your contract with magazine the first) a reprint fee. If the reprinting magazine wants the writer to actually rework the piece for their publication, they should be paying for that work.

So The Atlantic stepped in it, no question. And they aren’t the only ones. Like Nate and most other working writers, I’ve been asked to write “for exposure” by a handful of different places and I’ve turned down almost all of those opportunities because unless you have a book to promote or some other specific reason to need exposure, it’s pretty hard to document whether you actually get any return on that kind of investment. As Nate points out, exposure doesn’t buy groceries.

And this goes beyond the basic investment-to-payoff ratio. I think it’s very important for writers keep saying no to those requests as consistently as we can (while understanding that sometimes we can’t) because whenever we give our work away for free, it makes it that much more difficult to negotiate better pay for said work. If we’re saying that writing isn’t worth paying for, to be sure, the media companies won’t say it for us — they’re too busy trying to figure out a profitable business model that involves the Internet. (Required reading because as freelancers we have to understand this math: Alexis Madrigal’s A Day In The Life of a Digital Editor, which responds to Nate Thayer and maps out exactly what places like The Atlantic are up against right now, trying to stay afloat.)

But there’s understanding the math and giving in to it. When you say you won’t work for free, you’re shining a light on why it’s so inappropriate to be asked that question in the first place and — she said, hopefully — making it more awkward for that editor to ask the next writer the same thing. When you negotiate a better paycheck for yourself, you’re negotiating for all of us by helping to raise the standard of acceptable treatment of writers.

Now that I’ve said all of that…

I have some thoughts about the right and wrong way to go about these negotiations. Because amidst all the emails and Twittering and ranting about how The Evil Atlantic took advantage of Nate Thayer, I’m seeing some themes that disturb me. Let’s start with all that ranting. Folks, it is essential that we keep these conversations professional. We already labor under an unfortunate misconception that as freelancers, we are vaguely inept, flighty and entitled. When we get rant-y and overly impassioned and talk about fat cats keeping us down, we only play into those stereotypes. Nobody wants to pay that guy more.

To this end, while I applaud Nate for the civil tone of his emails and for having the courage to take the exchange public, I also feel sorry for the editor that he kinda threw under the bus when he posted those emails on his blog. (She was on the second week of her job, by the way.) I would have preferred to see a direct exchange with the magazine’s editor-in-chief or the website’s director of digital content. So please remember, when you’re saying no, not to kill the messenger. Most assigning editors don’t get to decide what their freelance budget will be — they have to work with what they’ve got to meet the expectations of their top editors (you know, so they can keep their not-always-that-well-paying-either jobs — again, go read Alexis’ post, which maps this all out more thoroughly than I can). In this economy, that usually means having to get creative. Ergo, weird requests for content in exchange for exposure. Like Alexis, my editor friends feel pretty bad when they have to make crappy offers like that. Most have been freelancers at one point themselves and know they may go freelance again. And most will go to bat for their writers to get more (or, okay, any) money whenever they can (and whenever you ask — they need us to ask). So this should never be an us vs. them thing. They are also us.

We also need to keep some degree of perspective on this. I saw a comment in the Interwebs this week from a freelancer comparing our plight to that of exploited factory workers. Okay now. As a freelance writer, I get to set my own schedule, wear what I want, take breaks when I want, waste time on Facebook, set my own income goals and watch Buffy at lunch. I’ve interviewed a lot of low-wage workers in the past few years. They do not have these perks. They are trying to get from minimum wage to $9 or maybe $11 per hour. Nate Thayer is lamenting a lost world of $125,000 retainer jobs “with rights to publish elsewhere.”

And a quick word about that lost world: Obvs, I’d love to earn $125,000 for six stories a year, as opposed to the 50 to 60 assignments it takes me to earn that now. Those six stories would benefit from my having far more time and energy to focus on them. Plus the overall income potential is far greater since, come on, how long does it take to write six stories? You can probably fit in another dozen or so and still take every Friday off. Or start writing a book at the same time.

But those big fancy jobs were always relatively scarce because writers of that caliber are relatively scarce. It takes time and buckets of crazy hard work to work your way up to that level. (Plus an old boys’ network, which is thankfully, a little more scarce now, though not enough judging from the latest VIDA byline tally.) In whatever fantasy land where those gigs were way more common — lots of older freelance writers do like to wax poetic about such glory days — we shouldn’t be surprised that publications decided to make them much less so. How does it make any kind of business sense to have a bunch of writers swanning around with six deadlines a year when you need a minimum of twelve stories just to put on all of your covers, not to mention an endless well of content to fill your website?

Of course the vast majority of freelancers, whether they’re just breaking in to the industry or have been doing this for 25 years, already know how rare that $125K-for-six-stories gig is. Many of them are wracked with debt, like Alexis describes, or dependent on a spouse for income security, or juggling freelance writing with teaching or shifts at Starbucks. And still struggling to pay the bills each month. It’s not factory life but it’s a long way from five martini lunches at Balthazar or wherever. Where things go off the rails for this group is that we don’t have a lot of clear role models for how to get beyond that grind to something more self-sustaining (maybe, even, with a savings account). And with everything that is messed up about digital journalism (plus all this fear that better-paying print will vanish any day now) it’s getting even tougher to see your way clear to that path. Ergo, panic and mayhem when someone like Nate Thayer gets the “work for exposure” request because if they can ask someone as established and fancy as him, what hope is there for the rest of us working stiffs? And if we aren’t shooting for some glamorous “on retainer” fantasy or a six-figure book deal, where does this rather wobbly career ladder lead?

I can’t solve the bigger questions of how digital journalism will ever enable writers to make a living wage or whether print will survive to keep it up. I have absolutely no idea where or how this industry is going to evolve and what new ways media companies will dream up to exploit writers in order to stay competitive. But I do trust that there will be a career path for writers if we pay attention, stay adaptable, and develop our own kind of business savvy. I started blogging about the business of freelancing so I can share what I know (and am still learning) about how these sustainable career paths develop. Because they do, even now. And so that we can make sure writers are a part of those bigger conversations about the bigger questions — or at least, that we know what’s going on and can strategize our way around it.

So instead of romanticizing some Mad Men-style past that maybe never existed or getting caught up in some idea of ourselves as the new garment factory workers, let’s stay focused on what will really help the freelance workforce: Learn how to negotiate. Know your rights. Think of editors as your allies. Stay professional. Keep talking and brainstorming about what this new career path can and should look like for us. And yeah, don’t work for free. 

I fully admit to falling asleep after Russell Crowe ruined the Les Mis group singalong, but now that I’ve caught up on the remaining 19 hours of the Oscars last night, there are a few things I think we need to talk about.

1. Enough with the Black Swanning already.

Forget your feelings about her nipple-y dress and overly earnest acceptance speech, Anne Hathaway killed it f*cking dead as Fantine and I’m glad she won. At the same time, I am not excited about two big wins, two years in a row, for already-tiny actresses winnowing down to skeleton size for these roles. I know there’s a case to be made for method acting and I guess, yes, an 18th century French prostitute dying of consumption would be pretty starved-looking. (Though the chicks who played her on Broadway never seem to need to go there.) See also an insane ballerina. But the media frenzy around these weight-loss-for-art stories only reinforces our skewed ideas about what women need to look like to be successful. We do not get this lathered up when male actors change their body shape for a part, period. It also gets in the way of appreciating the fine acting these women are actually doing because instead of talking about the interesting choices they made with their brains, we’re thinking, as usual, that women are their bodies and not much more.

2. Enough with Seth MacFarlane. 

I like Family Guy and I wanted to like this. I even laughed a lot at the “We Saw Your Boobs” song — and I’ll stand by that one because I think there is maybe a feminist interpretation to be made about the Los Angeles Gay Male Choir singing that song. It could be a satirical comment about how overexposed and objectified female actresses have become (see above)? Yes? Maybe? Unfortunately, everything went downhill from there and when he started relying on cliched, completely unfunny cracks about “every woman’s innate ability to never let anything go,” we were done. Over to Tina and Amy, please. I think we already established that they should host everything forever now. What more proof do you need?

3. Dear God, enough with Kristen Chenoweth. 

Clearly, she’s gunning for a talk show and that’s why she had to get all cheesy and heart-to-heart with every celebrity on the red carpet. But did she have to keep taking her shoes off to show us how short she is? Again with the “look at my body, not my talent” theme. The most awkward moment was when she randomly asked Hugh Jackman if he thought she weighed less than an Oscar statue. Which is eight and a half pounds. Why is it cute for a grown woman to want to weigh less than my cat?

4. But at least we have Quvenzhané Wallis.

She’s basically the only ray of hope to come out of the whole evening, from carrying that super cool puppy purse on the red carpet to flexing a little muscle when her name was called. I will not speak of what The Onion tweeted about her because they are now dead to me. Except to say: This need to shut down a confident, talented little girl because she’s sassy about her obvious awesomeness and not sitting there demurely like a little lady? This is where the whole problem starts.

PS. Just a gentle reminder that this critique about the celebration-of-skinniness that was the Oscars should not be interpreted as thin-actress-bashing. Nobody needs to go eat a sandwich. (For more, Kate has a great post about this up today on Eat the Damn Cake.) My point is that all of these women (yes, even Kristen) are talented above and beyond their body shapes — and that’s what we should focus on when we’re giving awards for their work.

PPS. Also, Argo was a great movie, but Ben Affleck and George Clooney aren’t helping matters with their utter failure to include a strong (or even remotely memorable) female character. Surely one of those hostage chicks could have gotten some decent lines?

[Image: Those are Katherine Hepburn's Oscar statues. Just because. Via buschap.]

Co-worker Walter gets on top of some filing. 

Introducing a new feature for The Freelance Life: Day in the Life snapshots! I love when other blogs do these — especially So How Was Your Day?, which obviously does nothing but — because I am absolutely beyond nosey (yes I will also look in your bathroom cabinets when you invite me over, without a modicum of shame). And with freelancing, there are just so many endless variations on how you could spend your day! But I have a working theory that while there are many different effective working styles, there are better and worse things you can do with your time to be productive and successful. And that perhaps the freelancer stereotype of sleeping until 3 PM, working in your pajamas and eating Ramen noodles for all your meals falls into the “worse” category.

Feel free to prove me wrong, though. I’ve already hit up a bunch of successful freelance writer friends to share their daily routines, so those are coming soon and we’ll just see what we see. In the meantime, I figure the game is only fair if I play first, so here is how I spent Thursday, February 21.

Disclaimer: I am definitely a routine-loving person, so my days do follow a pretty regular schedule, although every six months or so I seem to switch up the bones of it a bit, based on any manner of factors (my current workout preferences, deadline load, phases of the moon, whatever). So this is just what’s currently working for me. Oh and also, in case you’re wondering, this wasn’t a light day but it wasn’t extraordinarily busy, either. I tried to pick a relatively average workload day to give you the realest deal.

6:30 to 7:00 am: I’m woken up by some combination of my alarm and the cat. Dan is already up and out of the shower because he commutes to New York City three days a week and catches an unbearably early train. We chat while he gets dressed and I check email on my phone and put off getting out of bed for as long as possible. The cat (who has a pro-sleeping-late agenda) wants to snuggle, which makes this even harder.

7:00 am to 8:30 am: Yell “I love you!” while shuffling out of bed as Dan leaves to catch the 7:13 train. Appreciate that he is very nice about not resenting me and my laziness on these mornings. I honestly cannot tell you what I do during the first 90 minutes of my day. Officially, my only goals are to eat breakfast while reading the New York Times on my iPad and take a shower. But why this takes so long to accomplish can only be chalked up to my morning fugue state. I think I also do things like feed the cats, tidy up the living room and unload the dishwasher, but without witnesses, I don’t have any proof. I can tell you that I manage to get dressed in my official work uniform: Jeans, tank top, cardigan.

8:30 to 10:00 am: Most days I fit in a quick hike or walk (we’re lucky to live right between the glorious Hudson River and an excellent network of woodsy trails, so gym memberships are delightfully moot) to stave off heart disease and agoraphobia (a very common affliction among us work-from-home types). Today I skip that because I’m going to yoga later, and want to get right to work. I always use the first 90 minutes of my work day to tackle the most finicky writing challenge on my to do list. I picked this tip up from Julie Morgernstern when I interviewed her last year about her book Never Check Email in the Morning, and it has been life-changing — honestly, it’s my best work habit and you should so copy me. You can get more done in this first hour than you do the whole rest of the day combined.

Today I use the Magic Hour to revise an essay for Elle. I mostly stay off the Interweb while I do this, except for a quick back-and-forth email with my editor to answer a question and some Googling to check some stats.

10:00 to 10:30 am: Revise is almost finished, so I take a break to eat a yogurt, answer a few emails, start this blog post, and peruse my Google Reader and Facebook for news of the world.

10:30 am to 12:30 pm: I get on the phone to interview three sources for a New York Magazine story that I’ll be drafting later today. I pop over to my standing desk to do these so I can, well, stand while I talk. (Yes, I’ve totally bought the hype about sitting as the silent killer and now try to stand whenever I’m on the phone, since the rest of my life is one big sit-a-thon.) In between calls, I’m doing the email thing, trying to get some interviews set up for other stories for next week and following up with editors about the status of some pitches and paychecks. I also futz a little more with the Elle essay because there are a couple of paragraphs that I’m just not loving yet. I also put water on to boil for lunch.

12:30 to 1:30 pm: Make and eat lunch (whole wheat rigatoni tossed with goat cheese, grape tomatoes and lots of parsley and lemon — oh sad Midtown salad bars how I do not miss you!). When Dan works from home, we usually eat together. When I’m on my own, this is guilty pleasure TV time. At the moment I am re-watching all of Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the thousandth time. Spend 45 minutes finding Dawn annoying yet Joss Whedon masterful as usual. When I’m done eating, I do some stretches and break out my beloved foam roller to work the hunched-over-the-laptop kinks out of my back and neck.

1:30 to 3:00 pm: I finish up the Elle revise, then interview a source for a Marie Claire story that I’ll be writing next week. While it’s not at all unusual for me to bounce around between several assignments like you’re seeing today, I will say that this was an unusually high volume reporting day because both this and the New York piece are pretty science-heavy and require a lot of sources (i.e. smart researchers who will patiently translate their work into words I can understand).

In a perfect world, I’d separate out reporting days and revising/writing days (and on writing days, I’d only tackle one story at a time #daretodream!) because it can be tough to switch modes like that. But in this Spike-is-only-fictional world, it’s bog standard to have projects going at several different stages. So I’m always revising a finished piece, writing a new piece and reporting the piece I’ll write next all at the same time.

This is why, when people ask “what are you working on right now?” at parties and such, I tend to get very deer-in-headlights and am unable to remember anything I’ve ever written.

3:00 to 5:00 pm: I start writing the New York Magazine piece. My writing process always begins with some sort of rough outline — in this case, reading through my reporting file and pulling all the relevant points and quotes into some kind of coherent narrative in a separate Word document. I get this done but leave what I call the “pretty” writing for tomorrow’s Magic Hour — one great thing about freelancing is that you can work according to your natural rhythms and my rhythm is that my brain turns to mush after 4 PM.

5:00 to 7:00 pm: I get changed, grab a snack (half a peanut butter sandwich) and go to yoga. Om.

7:30 to 9:30 pm: Dan has dinner plans in the city tonight, so I’m on my own and it’s Lazy Girl Cuisine (hummus, veggies, cheese and toast) all the way, plus more Buffy, some knitting, and then bed with the cats. But I don’t want you to think every night of my life is this glamorous. Usually we eat dinner (as in real meals that I cook) and hang out together for a few hours and I stay up until maybe 10 pm.

PS. I’d love to hear from more writers (with all levels of experience) for Day In the Life. If you want your daily routine considered for this feature, email it to me on virginiasolesmith [at] gmail [dot] com. Try to follow this format and include a picture or two of yourself, your work environment, what have you.

PPS. Thanks so much to Medium and ed2010 for republishing this post about knowing your worth. In case you aren’t familiar with them, Medium is pretty much the coolest new online writing community ever. And ed2010 is a wonderful resource for wanna-be writers and editors. They were a huge help to me when I was an intern/editorial assistant/industry whippersnapper and are still a phenomenal resource. So happy to spread the love! 

But what may amaze and delight me may be confusing to my lovely readers. As in, I’ve noticed a lot of new subscribers in the past few months — and a lot of new un-subscribers. Ouch… except I understand why. People often come to my site because they’ve read a specific story that I’ve written elsewhere — and then understandably get bored or turned off when they realize that I don’t blog 24/7 about that specific topic. (Be it MLM marketing scams or lighthouse renovations or what have you.)

So I thought it would be helpful to all you readers, new and old, if I sketched out a clearer mission statement for this blog and kept it posted right here on the top of the blog page, always and forever. (Or until everything about this site evolves again and that no longer makes sense.)

This blog is — and always has been — a writer’s notebook. When I started it as Beauty Schooled back in 2009, it was my notebook for one specific reporting project. It was a story that I was dying to tell and I hadn’t sold it as a magazine piece (those came later) or a book (that didn’t), so a blog seemed like it would be my best medium. It so was.

But since that project wrapped up, the scope of this blog has broadened considerably. It’s no longer the place where I’m telling one specific story. Instead, this is where I explore many different stories — about how women relate to beauty, about the intersections of beauty, obesity and health, about the influence of socioeconomic class, work and poverty on all of these things.  And just like a pen-and-paper writer’s notebook, my ideas here aren’t edited, polished or even fully formed. I jump around a lot from story to story, or I follow one subject intensely for a few weeks, then abandon it for something else.

I also use this space to talk about the business of writing, whether that means telling you about work that I’ve recently published, or The Freelance Life series where I’m outlining exactly how to run a freelance business (or at least, how I do it). That may seem really out of left field for those of you who are not writers or otherwise self-employed. But because freelance careers are women-dominated and all too often, underpaid and under-respected, I think it’s an important part of the larger conversation happening around here.

And sometimes, I just go rogue and write about the books I give as baby presents (the eternal number one post on this blog!) or, I don’t know, kitchen renovations. Because it’s fun — and if it’s happening in my life, odds are good that it will show up in my writing in some way.  

Last: I no longer post on any kind of regular schedule. Back in the Beauty Schooled days, this was a religious daily commitment, which I loved — but it sure got in the way of doing enough paying work. Then it devolved to three times a week, with my Never Say Diet gig, and then it became pretty random.

These days, my rule is that I have to write something that lights my creative fire every week — but the medium is flexible. Most of the time, that’s happening in the form of my work these days. Which is awesome, except that it means less creative energy left over to burn on the blog. So I’m enjoying the freedom to post just once or twice a week or more or less as the mood strikes.

But I realize that can be super annoying for readers (and it’s certainly not the way to proceed if you’re trying to turn your blog into a full-time paying gig!). Solution: Subscribe via email or RSS Feed so you never ever miss a post. (Those links are also always on the upper right hand corner of the blog home page.) You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter, if you want me to be playing a bigger role in your life. (I mean, of course you do.)

Well then. I hope this official statement on the unofficial nature of this blog was somewhat helpful. I sure feel better. And I hope you’ll continue to read, comment, argue and critique as the mood strikes you — because getting to engage directly with readers is the number one reason why I blog this writer’s notebook instead of keeping it all stuffed in a drawer somewhere.

Thank you so much for being here. 

When you’re starting out as a freelance writer (or really, in any creative/media-driven career), this really annoying thing happens: People ask you to work for free. A lot.

I don’t know too many lawyers or investment bankers or insert-almost-any-other-profession-here who have to work gratis or for “stipends” (read: slave wages and maybe some swag from the beauty closet) for years before they get a regular paycheck, but in our industry, it’s a rite of passage. I’m one of the “lucky” ones because I got most of my unpaid labor done in college via three unpaid magazine internships. I made fantastic connections at these “jobs,” and one of them turned into a full-time job after college, so lots of people would say, you see? Luck. But what really makes me lucky is that I come from a family who supported my career goals and were financially able to subsidize the huge corporations benefiting from my pro bono photocopying all those semesters by covering my living expenses through college and for a wee bit afterwards. #thanksagainparentalunits!

The vast majority of young Americans who might want to pursue editorial careers don’t have those resources, which is why our industry a little bit sucks. There has been some movement on this front, thanks to some 3,000 interns who were way gutsier than I ever was and got a class-action lawsuit together last year. I’d love to see this lead to a sea change and entry-level wages for interns across the board — but judging from how the corporate lawyers are handling this one, I think we’re a long way off from making that happen. (Now most publishing companies say that interns are required to receive documented school credit for their work. BTW, they actually always said that, it just wasn’t super enforced. So again, parents pay in the form of tuition for their kids to have these jobs.)

Plus the problem doesn’t end with unpaid internships. Freelance writing has always been, to some extent, cheap and undervalued labor. Magazines often spend far more on the lunch spread at your average photo shoot than they do on the article that accompanies the pretty pictures (or the week’s salary of the editorial assistant who ran around organizing the whole thing). And yes, we can put a lot of the blame on the skewed priorities of publishers. The Internet has also made this whole problem vastly worse because the average website pays in even tinier peanuts than print publications ever have — or expects you to write for free. (Thanks ever so much for starting that trend, Huffington Post.)

Plenty of others have talked about why this trend devalues content and makes it harder than ever to earn a living as a writer. And big picture, yes, I’m right there with you, one with the working man (or 20-something Girls extra, as the case may be). But because I actually have managed to earn a real grown-up salary from freelance writing for the best part of a decade,* I also want to talk about how you as the freelance writer can take some control in this crazy, uncontrollable industry and get paid for your work. As easy (and right!) as it is to blame the big corporations, you also need to know your rights and your worth. And take responsibility for your income so you can make it rain for your own self.

Here are my thoughts on how this happens:

1. Write the business plan. Set the income goals. Hold yourself accountable to your monthly accrual goals. You already know this part.

2. Realize that the word rate is a sham. Stop getting hung up on whether it’s $2 per word (glossy magazines) or 50 cents per word (newspapers) or $4 per word (Carrie Bradshaw at Vogue and probably nobody else, ever). Because guess what? You aren’t getting paid by the word. Let’s do the math.

Your editor assigns you a 1500 word story at $2 per word. Hooray, you think, that’s $3000! Then you turn your first draft in at 1892 words because you had a couple of really good lines that you just couldn’t cut. (Of course you couldn’t. You’re the writer. And frankly, I’ve never understood how you can be a good writer and not write long on your first draft. You need some meat to work with to find the good stuff.)

So now that’s 292 words that you didn’t get paid to write.

Then your editor asks for a revise that involves you deleting and rewriting oh, 978 words. Now that’s 1270 words that you didn’t write. As in, almost double the length of the original assignment.

And if the story ends up running at 1545 words? Nobody is going to add $90 to your paycheck.** In fact, if the story runs at 1412 words because the art director insisted her photos run so big, some places will take the 88 words ($176) off your paycheck. (Not many are this cruel but it has happened to me.)

3. So instead, get paid for your time. To do that, you have to take that word rate fee ($3000) and divide it by the amount of time you spent on the assignment. Maybe it took you two days to report, two days to outline and write, and another two days all told in revisions, answering fact-checker questions and so on. Well that’s 6 days of work — and at $3000, you just made $500 per day. That is not too shabby. Keep that up and you’re looking at real cash money.

I cannot overstate this: Knowing how much your time is worth is everything. This is how you can tell if an assignment is worth taking on in the first place: Maybe that $3000 sounds great but you know the magazine will need so many revisions, you’ll end up with a day rate of $150. That would mean you lose money on the job because you spent all that time doing their work when you could be doing someone else’s. Or maybe it’s a website assignment that only pays $100 — but you knock it off in an hour. That was a nice hour. We should all have more hours like that.

Knowing what your time is worth also means that you can give clear estimates when editors ask you for a project fee (this often happens with bigger projects like writing somebody’s book proposal or editing work). Plus some jobs actually want to pay you by the day or the hour, so now you know what to charge for that. And you can negotiate when the first fee an editor names is way below your asking price.

4. Know when it is worth it to do a little work for free. Look this business is what it is right now, and right now, working for free happens. I hate it, but there it is. I do not encourage new writers to write endlessly for free for anyone, but there are a few circumstances where I think it’s worth doing:

• If any editor asks to see a proposal for a story before she assigns it to you. Writing pitches and proposals is how we land the gig, so yes, you usually have to do this part for free. When you’re later reviewing how much time a project took, you should factor the proposal-writing time in to the overall fee. (So maybe add a day for that to the scenario I outlined above, and your day rate was $428 not $500. Still doing okay!) If it’s an editor or magazine that you’ve worked for regularly, you can also ask for a proposal fee — on the condition that if the proposal gets the green light, she can roll that fee into your total assignment fee. But that way, if the editors pass, you still get a little something for your time. But if you’re new to a magazine or cold pitching, you’re doing this part gratis.

• If the assignment is a personal essay or fiction (surely somebody still publishes fiction? Yes?). This kind of writing is very difficult to assess from a query letter so it’s standard practice for editors to ask to see the whole draft. You have to do the work upfront, then get paid — or if they reject it, take that work on to the next potential client.

• If you are baby-kitten-new to writing and have no other clips to your name. You’ve got to get some clips. This is your priority because without clips, nobody will pay you to write a damn greeting card. Also, quite frankly, you are not fancy yet and Vogue is not calling with $4/word, so don’t be too good for this. Take anything and everything that comes your way. I’m sorry the industry is set up this way but I promise you can get through this stage relatively quickly if you work hard and are not creepy.

• If the publication or website has such crazy amazing exposure, writing for free will ensure you fame and fortune. This is, after all, how HuffPo gets all its content for free… except it publishes so much content, it’s actually very hard to ensure your HuffPo piece doesn’t get lost in the sea of everything. But especially if you are new and in need of clips, or if you just rillyrillyrilly want to write for someone… okay, give it away just this once. But pay attention to what kind of dividends you reap — if it doesn’t lead to another paying gig and pretty fast, don’t you do this again.

5. Don’t write for content mills. Okay, I know that lots of writers who don’t have mainstream publishing connections do a ton of work for places like HubPages, Associated Content, and all of those others sites that pay literally pennies for assignments (or nothing but you have the potential to earn money via ad clicks or other revenue sharing models). I understand why these places are appealing: They’ll hire you, they talk a good game about how much earning potential you have, and there isn’t much of an editing process so it’s not like you waste time doing thousands of revises. You also get plugged in to a community of writers and considering what a lonely job this can be, that is nice.

But please. Don’t write for these places if you can possibly avoid it. They are shamelessly exploiting you. Your content mill clips are not going to get the attention of editors at bigger publications. You aren’t learning how to be a better writer, just a faster one. And websites like these are a huge reason why content has become so devalued — which means writers and readers everywhere suffer. They are the MLM scams of the publishing world. You are worth more. Hold out for something better. 

**

I am not the only creative professional having useful thoughts on this subject. If you want to read more on how to get paid for your work, check out this post by Emily Henderson (she’s an interior designer but there’s a lot that translates). I also really like this essay “To A Young Writer” by Wallace Stegner in The Atlantic, although you might just find it depressing (he is speaking largely to fiction writers and boy is that the very toughest of all the writing roads you could hoe).

Oh and Who Pays Writers? can be a useful source of information about what places are actually paying.

Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear what strategies you use to get paid what you’re worth — and if you’ve found other helpful resources, please share! 

*And I know many other writers doing the same, so no, I am not some crazy fluke.

**Actually, as one lovely editor just reminded me… this does happen at some (very lovely) places. And whenever I’ve had a story run significantly longer than the originally assigned word count, I’ve found editors to be pretty open to increasing the fee. But they usually have to go to bat for you with their boss. And they rarely get permission to increase the fee at the same word rate — it’s usually more like “here’s a little more to reflect your extra work here.” So again, think in terms of days or hours invested and fight for that.

[Image via Serial Thriller.]

Alright, alright, it’s finally time for us to finish up these business plans that we started oh so long ago.

The good news is, if you’ve already written up your professional goals and financial goals, you are basically set for the year — especially if this is your first year writing a business plan. Those are the most essential parts because now you know how much money your business will make and what you need to do to make that money. And have a warm and fuzzy feeling about your career, all at the same time.

But there is one other big element that I include in my business plans year to year, so today I’m going to give you that run down. And I’ve split it into two sections because if you’re brand new to the business, the way I do this section now won’t be helpful to you. But if you’ve been freelancing a bit — even dabbling — give this whole post a read because you should probably do both parts.

• FOR THE NEWBIES: Client Prospects

So you’ve got all these goals. You’ve got all this enthusiasm. But who the heck is going to pay you to do all this stuff? It’s time to get a bit more granular after all that big picture talk and decide who you’re going to target to get you some work.

Start by making a giant list of everybody you know who could potentially pay you to write stuff. Yes, this is very What Color Is My Parachute. But you need to know who you know. Next, make a list of all of the places you would love to write for but don’t know anyone there yet. If your lists are very long, it’s probably a good idea to rank them or categorize them in some way — maybe of the folks you know, some are more sure bets than others? Maybe you don’t know anybody so it’s better to sort all the unknowns into different markets or seeming accessibility? Futz around with this for awhile.

When you feel like you have a good sense of who all your potential clients are, get out your calendar and plot in 1-3 names from each list every week. (I’d say go with two you know and one you don’t, but up to you.) These are the folks you’re going to reach out to every week with story pitches. I suggest 1 to 3 names because I think that’s manageable, given how much work you need to put into writing good pitches. You may want to do more or less depending on your time, of course. But I also say 1 to 3 because I think otherwise, the temptation is to send out 50 pitches in your first week and then go jump off a bridge. Pitching is basically sort of horrible and often an exercise in futility, so stagger it out.

Also, when I first started freelancing and was feeling overwhelmed by my potential client list, a very wise and much more seasoned freelancer told me to breathe because “it’s always good to have a few more people to contact.” She was very genius. You actually never want to get to the end of this list.

What you want to happen is that after a few weeks of doing this religiously scheduled pitching (a lot of it stone cold to strangers), you land an assignment and then another one and then a snowball effect takes over and pretty soon you are too busy working on actual paying assignments to keep pitching this frequently. But eventually, a lull will crop up and you’ll start to panic about your ability to feed yourself — and that’s when you go back to the list.

• FOR THE ALREADY-BEEN-FREELANCING: Client Evaluations. 

I’m not going to lie. This is kind of my favorite part. Successful freelancing is alll about client relations — I often think that the six years I spent working part time in a bookstore during high school and college prepared me for this job better than anything else I’ve done, because I learned so much about customer service. There is a lot of going above and beyond in this job to keep your client happy. Happy clients means more work for you. So that’s kind of a no-brainer.

But all too often, I see this “keep the client happy” mentality translate to writers doing anything to keep terrible clients happy — even though they aren’t getting paid fairly or scoring awesome clips or getting anything else out of the relationship. This is because of fear: Writers think that they are bad at getting work so they have to hang on to every editor who gives them the time of day and take any level of abuse.

So listen up, because this comes straight from my mom, who, as I already told you, is very very wise: They are not worth it. If you are putting all your eggs in terrible client baskets, you are losing money and wasting time that could be spent getting better work.

Enter client evaluations, because if you don’t take the time to figure out who are the great clients and who are the sh*tty ones, you might not realize that you’re investing lots of effort and love into a client that is never going to get you where you need to be. (Terrible clients aren’t always obvious — as in, screaming and withholding paychecks terrible. Sometimes it’s more… subtle. Think emotional manipulation and psychological abuse that leaves no visible scars.)

So when I do this part of my business plan, I make a big list of all of the magazines, websites and other clients that I’ve written for over the past year. Then I grade them on the following factors:

•  How Long They Take to Pay (on a scale of 1-10). Everybody takes forever, but the average seems to be 90 days — so are they above average, below average or just average? 

• Rate of Pay (1-15). I have another blog post coming up asap to discuss this in more detail, but Cliff Notes: It doesn’t matter so much whether a client pays $2 per word or not. It matters how much time you spent on the assignment for the fee. Do the math. If you were making minimum wage, they get minimum points here. 

• Prestige (1-10). I mean, let’s face it, we’re all doing this to see our names in lights (or on the cover of the New York Times) right? Really, I think of prestige as having two parts: Will my Granddad want to take this article in to show off to his physical therapist? (That would be almost all of them, because my Granddad is the best… so everyone seems to get points here.) And, will other editors be likely to read this article in the course of their everyday business and then think “Ah ha! I should hire her to write for us!”? (That is fewer places. So those places get a lot more points.) 

• Good Clip (1-10). I know, this sounds like prestige, but what I really mean is: Was this a story that filled your heart and mouth with pure joy? Even if it was for a less prestigious publication, that is rad. There are plenty of stories every year that are pleasant enough but I cannot honestly say will make the world a better place or made me a better person to write. Getting those stories is a privilege. Mad points to the client who made it possible.

• Editor Awesomeness (1-10). Maybe the most important thing on this list (okay after getting paid). Do you have a good rapport with the editor you’re writing for? Because boy does that make this job more fun. Not to mention, more likely to lead to future assignments and riches and glory. 

• Clear Assignment (1-10). This might sound like a repeat of Editor Awesomeness, but it’s really more about how the whole magazine works together — because you can have an awesome editor, but if there is a crazy editor-in-chief prone to changing his or her mind at the drop of the hat, that makes pinning down your assignment a lot trickier. If they all seem to be on the same page most of the time you are set up for much more success. 

• Hassle-Free Revise (1-10). Note that this doesn’t say “no revise.” 99 percent of clients will need you to revise your story. But is it one big revise, followed by a handful of follow-up questions? Or is it two or three rounds of ripping everything apart? Or what I call the Slow Death Revise — where they don’t really make you do all that much rewriting and it seems so lovely, until they’re sending you emails five times a day with “just a few more questions” most of which are unanswerable by man or God. 

• Fact-checker Awesomeness (1-5). The magazine’s fact-checker is your very best friend in the whole world, because he or she makes sure that you didn’t screw up something really boneheaded — or at least, if you did (you probably did, I always do) they catch it before it goes to print and everybody knows about it. (Sometime if you get me drunk, I will tell you my Very Worst Most Humiliating Fact-Check Fail story. Otherwise, I take it to my grave.) So a magazine with awesome fact-checkers who go over your story with a fine tooth comb but also don’t make you insane in the process gets big points from me. 

• Repeat Business (1-10). Pretty self-explanatory. Did you get more work? Then you like this client more than the one that went AWOL after one beautiful night together. 

• New Market (1-10). This one is optional but I encourage it even if you are passionate about only writing for, say, news magazines or lady magazines or dog enthusiast magazines. In this economy, it pays to diversify. So if a client is from a market where I’m less well-established, I get excited about it. 

Feel free to tinker with the categories based on your own experiences of course. My list gives us a nice even ten. And as you can see from the score ranges above, if we make them all worth 10 points, then we have a possible total of 100 points for each client. (Actually, I don’t make them all worth 10 because some things are more important to me than others; that’s why Rate of Pay is worth 15 points and Fact-Checker Awesomeness is worth 5 points, but you can do your own math.)

So, of course, I put this all into a spreadsheet, grade each client on every category and then total up the results. Then you can give every client a letter grade based on their numeric score, just like my biology teacher did in 12th grade. Feel free to employ a curve if necessary if you’re a tough grader, just like my biology teacher did in 12th grade.

Now it’s like you’re a hostess at a cool restaurant with an unlisted phone number, sorting through your A-List, B-List, C-List and D-List clients. The A-Listers are the people who should get your most love and attention this year. Send them lots of pitches, make lunch plans, offer to babysit their kids (don’t do that, I told you not to be creepy). When it comes to the lower grades, you may have to make some tough choices. First, take a good long look at why they scored so badly and ask yourself: Is it them or me? If you screwed up a deadline or otherwise botched a job, the editor in question is fully entitled to be less than awesome to you. Maybe you can do some repair work. Or maybe it’s a mutual failing, but there are some real pros to working with them, so it’s worth trying to do a little trouble-shooting.

Or maybe they are a truly terrible client and you should never work for them again. Or at least, not go out of your way to do so.

In addition to the grading, I like to write little report card summaries for myself, detailing why a client is so amazing or not. This is very helpful because you might let a C or D-list client fall off your radar for awhile… but then suddenly they come back to you three years later because a new editor works there or whatever. Then you can look back at why things went sour the first time and decide whether it’s worth a second chance. (It usually is, in my book, anyway.)

The last part of my client evaluations involves looking at anyone who scored well in past years but either dropped a grade or I simply didn’t write for in the past year. It’s good to pinpoint why that happened — did your editor leave the magazine? Did they change focus? Did you drop the ball on pitching? Decide whether you need to step up your efforts in that department or not.

Bottom line: Clients are your everything. Understanding which relationships to prioritize and which to cut loose will make you more efficient and better at providing great service to the folks who really deserve your love — which will make it easier to achieve all those goals you set in the first parts of your plan.

And that, my friends, brings us to the end of Business Plan Writing 101. Hopefully you have a clear road map of what you want your business to look like, how much money you want to make, and what you need to do to get there.

And I’m wide open to hearing your thoughts and questions on this — are there other elements that would be genius to include that I just haven’t thought of? Do you have even more beautifully color-coded spreadsheets (like that’s possible)? Share your brilliance, please! 

[Image: PS98 First Grade Report Card from 1950, via Herbie in the Hills.]

I know I’m subjecting you guys to some blog radio silence at the moment — and here you are, only halfway through your business plans! It’s the usual holidays-work-travel pile-up but I promise we’ll get back to that soon.

In the meantime, I’m delighted to report that several of my posts have been reprinted over on We Are the Real Deal, a project of the nonprofit NORMAL, which raises awareness about eating disorders, body image and self-esteem through the arts. We Are the Real Deal is “an educational blog universe” where a roster of over 40 contributors blog about body image, self-esteem and nutrition for young girls and women.

They are doing some wonderful work and I’m honored to be a part of it. In case you missed these essays the first time around, you can catch today’s re-post, on secret fat envy, now. Or click here to see my other reprints (on the Olympics, fitspiration and other cool stuff).

I don’t have to tell you that the story of Sandy Hook is a tragedy beyond comprehension.

But Sandy Hook is also a story of helpers.

And now it is time for all of us to be helpers, too.

Liza Lang was helping when she wrote “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” to show how poorly our country misunderstands, mistreats and ignores people with mental illness.

Mayor Bloomberg and the Campaign of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (and many other activists) are helping by demanding that President Obama and Congress come up with a plan to end gun violence. 

But critics are slamming both of these efforts. Jezebel argued this morning that playing the mental illness card only increases the stigma against those suffering and distracts us from the real issue of gun control. And the gun lobby says that banning guns would only be a Band-Aid solution.

Why are we making this terrible choice? We need the Band-Aids — desperately. And we need better mental healthcare access with more comprehensive treatment programs. Desperately. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. As Caitlin Kelly blogged: 47 percent of Americans own guns. 25 percent will suffer from a serious mental health issue during their lifetime. We do not understand how these groups overlap — partly because asking about gun ownership or access is not part of any doctor’s mental health diagnosis. The conversation isn’t mental health reform versus gun control. The conversation is how to achieve mental health reform and gun control.

It is time for us all to be helpers. Because there is a lot of work to do.

Start helping by signing some petitions here, here, and here. And for a list of ways to donate and show support for the families of Newtown, click here.

(EDITED TO ADD: I just read Hanna Rosin’s analysis of Lang’s essay over on DoubleX, and I’ll admit, it gives me pause about holding Lang up as a shining example of helpfulness here. But her essay’s main point — that prison feels like the only solution for her 13-year-old son and that is a huge national failure — is still an important one. And if she’s struggling herself to stay sane in a difficult situation, all the more reason we need compassion and strategies to help these struggling families well before their kids end up in as victims or perpetrators of violence.)

[Image via MoveOn.org]