Write Other Things

So I actually have another demand on my time besides The Amateurs, a marriage, a cat and the Best Day Job in the World: a freelance writing practice. I've written articles for a couple of magazines and copy for a couple of PR ventures, but my favorite client by an order of magnitude is The History Channel Magazine (available in Barnes & Noble stores nationwide!). I get to write stuff for them that I'd be interested in reading, which is a great boon to a freelancer; it has taught me an awful lot and on top of everything it's thrown me a decent amount of spare change. Not enough to quit the BDJitW, but enough to finance a couple of pretty awesome vacations. The current issue, for any who are interested, features me on heritage breed livestock, which was of course fascinating but for some reason a deadly hard topic to write about.

I have deadlines coming up for two HC articles in December and two again in February, and -- this is so typical there ought to be a pill for it -- the need to simultaneously research and write two articles while trying to maintain any level of involvement in The Amateurs has rendered me all but incapable of doing either. I have never been one of God's anointed multitaskers, but faced by the choice of (a) researching haunted hotels on the Internet or (b) going for a walk with my microcassette recorder and dictating a thousand words of fiction, I seem to default to (c) picking out slipcovers for the dining-room chairs or (d) surfing the Op-Eds for my daily dose of outrage.

Word Count: 29,006 (+695)