…but really he’s spying on people at the U Chicago campus.

Bad News: I have to work today.

Good News: We slept in until the sun woke us up, had a wonderful walk to the river during which I took the photo that appears below, and right now Ross is making chocolate-chip cookies from his mom’s recipe.

In the two weeks since I wrote about my (still somewhat tentative) inclination to commit to freelancing full time instead of looking for an in-house writing or editing job after we move, several lovely people have told me how happy they are to hear this because it means they’ll get to read more of my work. Sadly, though, while there pretty much isn’t any compliment I like to hear more, becoming a professional freelancer in the writing world doesn’t necessarily—or even very often—mean that you end up writing anything your friends would ever actually want to read, or anything that given the choice you would ever actually want to write.

It means you end up writing what other people need to have written, and (crucially) what they are willing to pay you for. The vast majority of the work out there for someone who doesn’t have a lot of existing publication experience is work-for-hire stuff like “web content” (how-to articles, guides to cities, bland biographies, and the like—I already have a gig like this, and am frankly quite happy with the job because it pays promptly and never requires rewrites) or advertising copy, or if you’re me, various bits and pieces of school publishing ephemera that get put in textbooks to bore and enlighten 6th graders. Also, the competition is fierce and the pay low because there are approximately seventy-nine million people out there who are all trying to work from home. Lots of them will even work for free, in exchange for the mythical “exposure” that every piddling startup website offers in spades.

I recently applied for a freelance job that I didn’t get, and when the email letting me know about this arrived, I was told that over 600 people had submitted their applications; the company ended up hiring 21 people, after rating their pool of applicants on a 5-point scale in two different areas and cross-referencing the resulting “grades.” Do you know what that means? It means we were entering into an application process that was about three times as competitive as the one experienced by the thousands of high school graduates who yearned to be admitted to Harvard and Yale this year. This is a hard field to make a living in. It is an even harder field to excel in. Most of the time, within limits, if you want to keep eating those Grape Nuts for breakfast, you take what you can get.

Of course, you can pitch and submit articles to reputable and interesting magazines, and you can certainly write and submit book proposals full of just the kind of writing you really want to do, in your heart of hearts. But those are acts of faith, not the sort of thing that pays the electricity bill or puts the zeros in your rent check. Working freelance writers—at least of the kind I’m going to be for the first many years, and possibly forever—are just that: working.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, or to give the impression that I don’t believe in my own ability. I definitely don’t mean to make you stop wishing me luck or congratulating me on my (almost)decision, because I truly believe the benefits—being able to work while I travel, being able to structure my working day in a way that makes sense to me, avoiding office politics—will far outweigh the drawbacks. What I do mean to tell you is that while I very dearly hope you will read more of my writing (I even have a plan for how!), the part of it you’ll see most likely won’t be “work.” It’ll be labor-of-love stuff. For free. For the sake of my sanity. For you. Because in many ways I wouldn’t be doing this at all if it wasn’t for you.

Boston says goodbye so sweetly.

All I can say is they’d better have graffiti of this caliber in Chicago.

(I can also say that I had the world’s most delicious blackberries this evening, but that doesn’t seem as relevant.)

This week my Things are 10 dear Flickr-friends—all people I’ve never even met who somehow manage to make my life richer, funnier, happier, more beautiful and more interesting every single day.

1) I like Rachel (whom I like to call MJ) so much—she is intelligent, dry, generous, and wholly herself—that I am almost afraid to meet her, in case I find myself tongue-tied.

2) Greg invited me to be his assistant editor on Utata last year, and for that single pleasure alone I am indebted to him. He’s also one of the most challenging and delightful colleagues I’ve ever had. And I have great colleagues.

3) Pretty much every single day I have the impulse to hug Melissa, whose face expresses all the the love, strength, and beauty in the world.

4) If I tried to tell you how great Lori is, you would probably think I was making her up. She seems to possess boundless reserves of good spirit, and she gives it away. For free!

5) I have a huge creative crush on Liza. She’s fearless and inventive in ways I would give my right arm to be, and her sense of humor makes me go weak in the knees. Liza’s my idol.

6) Kevin is incredibly erudite (I often find myself looking things up after I visit his stream) and also incredibly appealing. These traits are difficult to combine in a single human being—Kevin manages admirably.

7) Maggie is approximately seven different people, and all of them are shockingly fabulous. She lives in Chicago, but she has so many fans I’m not sure she’s going to be accessible. :-)

8) I was trying to pick photos that were all the same orientation for this little exercise (which has so far taken me the last 75 minutes, so it’s not that little)— but I don’t think there’s any other picture of Lori’s (this is a different Lori. Stay with me.) that could describe why I like her so much. Oh, well. You know what they say about consistency.

9) Phil has been an encouraging voice to me for almost as long as I’ve been on Flickr. He’s as gracious and kind as they come, and when he visits he never fails to say something that makes me stop in my tracks and actually think about what I’m doing (not a natural instinct, apparently).

10) Kicey is a star. No, really. She’s a self-luminous celestial body, and she’s definitely visible at night from the Earth. I’m frankly blown away that she even knows my name, let alone that she says lovely things to me. Kicey’s rising in the sky, too. You just wait and see.

There you go—10 of my long-distance love affairs. I can’t get enough of you folks.