My First Freelance Article

I’m posting links to my freelance articles on this blog — they appear under the heading “Articles.” Very clever, I know. 🙂 

I plan to do a post for most of these past articles and probably future ones. And perhaps some posts about how to freelance. Or at least how to freelance from my perspective.   

Anyway, this blog post is about my first freelance article, so it has some sentimental meaning for me. 

My first ever freelance pitch resulted in my first freelance article.  This is very unusual. But I had an “in” at Arlington Magazine, a regional publication where I live, and was not ashamed to use it. Mrs. Anysecondnow was, at the time, the practice manager for a mental health practice. A mental health practice that advertised regularly in Arlington Magazine on full page spreads and regularly contacted Mrs. A about future advertising. Bingo.  

I e-mailed the publisher with my pitch, dropping my connection to Mrs. Anysecondnow and the mental health practice in my first sentence. I got a reply in less than 48 hours from their editor expressing interestBig BreakI'll never know if there was a separate communication between the publisher and editor along the lines of, “just publish something of his online.  If it stinks, edit it as much as you can', and I don't mind either way. .  I was too ignorant back then to know that freelancers might be fortunate to get any response to your pitch — most editors don’t even respond. And if they do, the reply can take several weeks or more.

I pitched an article about the longest and steepest hills in Arlington. As a cyclist, I rode those hills often to train for events and I thought it’d be fun to evaluate and rate them for other cyclists and runners.

But before giving me a final “yes”, Arlington Magazine’s editor asked me for any recent articles. Uh-oh. My only recent writing samples were legal briefs from my day job as a government attorney. Pretty different from a breezy article on riding bikes on hills. Not to mention they were classified.

Thinking quickly, I decided to just write the article right then. I knew all I needed to know about the hills, I’d ridden them dozens of times, so there wasn’t much research. I knocked it out in a few hours, got Mrs. Anysecondnow’s grammar and style suggestions, and sent it to the editor with a note kind of skipping over the idea of writing samples and saying, hey, here you go.

It worked. She liked the article, made a few edits, and posted it on their website a few days later. A few weeks later I got a check for $300. And now I had a relevant writing sample for future pitches.

Pretty easy, I thought. Maybe I could make a career of this instead of the law! Not so easy as I soon learned, but getting paid for writing about my travels and experiences has still been fun.

And that’s the story of my first freelance article.

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