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.