Hello again

OMQ is now Wild Writing

Hi writer friend,

A familiar conviction is echoing in my chest these days.

This time, I’m going to make it work. This time, I’m going to do more pre-reporting, more networking, more pitching until enough editors finally open my emails and say oh WOW, yes, this is brilliant, and OF COURSE you can write it for us, and we’ll pay you two dollars a word. And then more assignments will roll in, and I’ll have exactly the right amount of nicely spaced due dates. I’ll even have the brain space to pursue those wonky, unwieldy creative ideas that always get snagged on the urgency to work work work and make more money. This time, it’s all going to feel good and safe; the fog will burn off, and I’ll finally be able to see that tiny island of writerly success and steer my boat to solid ground.

This time!

But wait. We’ve been here before. And many of you have been here with me.

If you’re new here, I’m Britany, a writer who’s worn all the hats, pitched all the places, written for many of them, and been ignored by more. A writer who has a lot of big ideas and goals and some insecurities about timeline and direction and some nebulous idea for a book I keep reimagining. In short—probably—a writer like you.

One of these days, I’ll have professional headshots. For now, you get a selfie from the middle of a cold and snowy run last week.

I started a newsletter called One More Question FIVE years ago (holy smokes), and a lot of you read it regularly in those days when I was posting calls for pitches along with essays and Q&As on the craft and business of writing every week. I poured a lot of heart and hard work into this space back then. And I got to know a lot of you, which was very cool.

Then I had a baby and entered the scariest three months of my life, which was completely different from the new-parent challenges I’d been reading up on. When I was finally able to bring my daughter home from the hospital, 99 days after she was born, I was very tired and a little broken. I also very badly needed full-time work after an unexpectedly early (and unpaid) maternity leave.

Fast forward 2.5 years. That baby is a healthy, happy, chaos-sowing toddler. I’m living on the opposite coast, in Connecticut, with my family, in the town where I attended high school. And after a year at a full-time job that I really enjoyed in higher education, I am once again freelancing, wading into the foggy waters of a media landscape that is somehow even bleaker than when I first started this newsletter, at the peak of the pandemic, when we really thought things couldn’t get any worse.

HA!

I don’t need to run through the list of what’s happened in the world and to our industry since then. I know it lives in your bones, too.

But through all of that, somehow, we’re still writing. (I bet you are, aren’t you? Me too.)

So I’m back at it, and I’m back here. And while I have a tendency to enter these phases with renewed conviction to make it work this time, I am also being reminded that I have made it work. It just looks a little different each time, and it’s always changing.

But because we all chose writing as our calling and profession, we are doomed to keep searching for the next neon check mark that will make us feel like real writers. Or the next version of a story we haven’t yet written. Because new ideas and narratives are forever shifting, and to write toward those things, we have no choice but to set our sights on something far off and unreachable. It is a constant searching. A stretching of our ideas and imagination. And it is, I think, a big part of what makes us writers.

Rebecca Solnit’s “blue of distance,” which she writes about in one of my all-time favorite books A Field Guide to Getting Lost comes to mind often.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

In returning to this chaotic space of working for myself and writing stories, I am reminded that we never really arrive because then we’d have nothing left to write about. Our ambitions live in that blue of distance.

I don’t mean to romanticize the ways in which our work has gotten harder. The hard facts of it all are not romantic. It sucks. And it didn’t have to be like this. If the people in charge weren’t so goddamn greedy and if we lived in a society that prioritized health, happiness, and truth over the profit of a select few, we’d have more newspapers and magazines, more book publishers, higher rates, and more people telling important stories that would help all of us understand each other a little better. But. Here we are.

Where I do see some romance is in the passion that keeps us returning to the page. That’s why I’m not here to talk much about business development techniques or productivity hacks. I’m also not going to be rounding up calls for pitches so often this time around because there are a lot of other great resources for that now.

Instead, I’m here to help you keep loving this work, even while you have to do all the other stuff that doesn’t feel so creatively fulfilling. I’m here to stretch towards the next idea with you.

I wish we could all talk about this stuff in person over coffee.

In returning to the chaos of making a living as a self-employed writer, I’m sensing a familiar wind of inspiration that pushes me forward and then threatens to topple me over, again and again. There are so many things I want to learn about and cover! Urchin harvesting! Regenerative aquaculture! But look! Another invoice that hasn’t been paid. Another publication firing the only editor I’ve worked with and most of the others, too.

But then I clear out some time to think about the stories I feel most compelled to work on. I return to ideas that keep showing up and flitting around in my head. When I find a quiet moment to sit with them and write towards them, I don’t want to be doing anything else.

It doesn’t matter that it’s always hard and often very stressful. I still love this work.

No matter how hard it gets, we still need to write to make sense of the world, and people still need our stories.

I’m excited to be here, writing about the journey and sharing some hopefully helpful resources with you along the way.

One More Question is Now Wild Writing: Here’s What You Can Expect

• A new name, because it’s truly wild out here. Meet, Wild Writing!

• A new focus on place-based and nature writing, from travel essays to environmental journalism. (But also, isn’t all writing in some way about nature and place, even when we’re hiding in the walls we’ve built on top of those things? We’ll grapple with that.)

• Regular Q&As with writers in which we’ll dig into the roots of their work: Where do their ideas come from? How do they turn those ideas into regular paid assignments? And how are they coping with the current media landscape? I’ll ask.

• In The Weeds: A little overgrown field of literary inspiration from whatever I’m reading and can’t stop thinking about.

• The Big List of Deadlines for Nonfiction Writers, a regularly updated list of grants, fellowships, and more.

• Occasional calls for pitches and opportunities.

I can’t wait to make this a regular thing.

Stay inspired out there,

Britany