My Road to Becoming a Freelance Writer, Part 1

I don't remember ever not being a writer. I started out writing screenplays at a very young age, then turned my efforts toward fiction. My dream for the last 25 years has been to be able to support myself in some way so that I could spend time writing, until I could support myself by writing.

Becoming a freelance writer never occurred to me.

I spent several years looking for some way to make money at home so that I could write. I've been an Ebay seller, had a small cleaning business and tried out various sales companies. In the end, I always went back to working for a paycheck. My primary concern was supporting my kids, especially after my husband and I split in 2008.

When I became a single Mom, I was pretty sure that my chances of being able to work from home in any capacity were pretty slim. Most WAHM websites and work at home opportunities for Moms are geared toward women who have a husband's income to help pay the bills and keep bread on the table while they get established. The only alternative was to build up a pretty good nest egg to live on before leaving the work world for the work at home world.

Any single Mom will testify to how hard that is to accomplish.

In 2010, I was working seventy to eighty hours a week, including a commute that was 100 miles each way. I was a restaurant manager and fairly good at my job, but I hated it. I hated being away from my kids so many hours a week. I hated being an hour and a half away if an emergency came up. I hated that I had to work nights most of the time, so I would often go days without spending a single full hour with my kids. I spent a lot of time sitting in imaginary sackcloth and ashes because I felt like a failure as a mother.

I was absolutely desperate to change the situation but clueless how to do it. I prayed constantly and spent an awful lot of time online, researching all manner of work at home opportunities.  I looked at working as a homebased call center operator. I looked at becoming a virtual assistant. I was willing to do almost anything and I was willing to make a lot less money. I just wanted to be at home so that I could be a "real" Mom and so that I could get back to writing.

It's funny, but I don't remember where I happened across the possibility of becoming a freelance writer. My memory sucks (in fact, I have ADD, which, when combined with middle age and five kids, makes me nearly disabled) but I can usually recall truly important moments. Life-changing moments are usually pretty easy for me to remember. This one just dropped into the ether.

However, I did have that moment. I did accidentally run across the idea that freelance writing, online content writing, was an actual possibility.

From that moment, whenever it was, my horizon started looking suspiciously good.