An Editors Meeting

I mentioned that I went to a meeting at Hugo House, back on Monday evening. This was a gathering of a local guild of freelance editors, that I was alerted to by my friend Nina, a member. See, with this layoff has come the desire to change my status a little bit, and explore the world of freelance work, both writing and editing. In part this is due to my panicky jobhunting motto of "try everything quick." Last time I was laid off, it took me four months of sending out resumes and interviewing in my field, the old-fashioned way, before I landed another job. But mostly it's because I WANT to try freelance writing. It's the same urge that has made me start this blog: something about this layoff has made me turn a corner, and suddenly I want to get my REAL WRITING out into public. Somewhere out there are people who make money writing articles about culture and travel and interesting things. I know I can do that.

But freelance writing is also a very scary proposition. And, for an aspiring novelist, it has a bit of a feeling of taking my virginity down to the street corner. In my research I've become aware of a vast, undiscriminating hunger for "content" out there, a kinky shadow-world where "PLR packages" are bought and sold to provide anonymous websites with bite-sized info-chunks on trending hot-topix. Is that the life of a freelance writer? Do I really want to take my talent...there? Do I have to...wear those clothes?

Thus Monday evening found me walking up the familiar wooden porch steps of Hugo House for a meeting of freelance editors. Freelance EDITING, now, that strikes me as a good, safe end of the pool to start with. I can copy-edit with the best of them, and it's somehow more respectable, an activity I can do to my utmost without removing my spiritual bow-tie, so to speak.

Ah, Hugo House. Living in Woodinville I love any excuse to come back into the city, and especially to this weird and venerable Seattle institution. For those who don't know, Hugo House is a self-described "center for the literary arts," a kind of permanent creative writing workshop in a big, creaky, grey-shingled, gabled building on Capitol Hill. It's located on a tiny street with a sports field on one side, a college on another, and a strip of cheap bars on a third--and if there's a better location for a creative writing nexus, I can't envision it. I've taken a few of their writing classes over the years: some have been mind-blowing, others have simply blown, but they've all been friendly and well-attended. Hugo House has its fans and its detractors in Seattle, and the divide basically boils down to this: sometimes, the best thing for an unpublished writer is to be immersed in a welcoming fraternity of like-minded souls; other times, it's the worst thing.

I had no idea, however, that the world had so many freelance editors. I arrived early, due to the demise of my laptop at Tully's, and tried to keep count as the room filled up. By the time it climbed over 30 and they started making a ring of folding chairs around the big table, and standees began peering in from the doorway, I gave up. By far the majority of the editors were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, wearing sweaters and nice scarves, eyeglasses, and sporting shoulder-length hair in beautiful textures and colors. The few other men, who all arrived late and were relegated to the periphery, were either bearded and silent, or nerdy and chatterboxy.

The topic was Marketing Oneself, which explained the attendance, and I realized this was yet another incoming wave from the economic tsunami. The close, overcrowded room, and the preternatural intensity of focus on the presenters' ideas for generating business, didn't exactly fill me with confidence about the secure life of a freelance editor in today's marketplace. But I diligently took notes, and learned a few things about using LinkedIn and the ethics of posting before-and-after editing samples of clients' work on your website.

In the end, though, the piece of advice they stressed most was simply to "get yourself out there": promote oneself persistently and unabashedly. They joked about how this point needed stressing because editors as a group tended to be shy and introverted, and I realized, heading back down the porch steps into the cool night, that it had been a typical Hugo House class after all.