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honeycopy.com
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cole@honeycopy.com
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Thu, Dec 17, 2020 04:45 PM
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And, a few thoughts on "going pro" as a writer, a creative, an entrepreneur or a freelancer. On go
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And, a few thoughts on "going pro" as a writer, a creative, an entrepreneur or a freelancer. On going pro. I've been writing professionally since the middle of twenty-sixteen. And, when I say professionally, I don't mean bringing in a "liveable wage" but more so "going all-in". "Going all-in" for me looked like this: 1. Quitting my job at a small (but successful) advertising agency, in my hometown, where things felt safe. 2. Going to work for a construction company run by a gritty SOB who built his business on hustle and paid me cash to do the dirtiest work at the company –– tearing out carpet in 90+ degree apartment buildings, essentially whiting the canvas so his installers could come in behind me and lay new, fresh carpet, carpet that hadn't been caked with dogshit and cat piss. 3. Taking #2 because I could get off work between noon and two and this gave me ample room to spend the rest of the day and night writing and building what would eventually become Honey Copy. At the time, I didn't realize it, but by quitting my job at the agency, I wasn't just freeing up time to write but it was my way of unconsciously increasing the risk I was playing in, it was my way of adding another dragon to the field, it was my way of dragging my little tugboat up from the water and into the sand, grabbing a box of matches and a can of kerosene and setting the mother fucker alight. When your tugboat is burning behind you, shooting up a plume of smoke like a tiny chimney, it doesn't become impossible to fail but it becomes harder to fail because you don't have any way of getting back home. This, this burning one's proverbial ships at shore, is when one crosses the chasm from amateur to professional. It's not when you start making money. The money will follow if you've got the balls to strike the matches and the chops to be half-way decent at whatever it is you're after. For me, the money didn't follow until about a year and a half after I had taken up that job at the construction company. While I wasn't getting rich, I was finally making enough money slinging-ink to take a hiatus from my carpet tearing days. Today, nearly four years later, as I make more money writing than I'm comfortable talking about anymore, I can still feel in my hands the ache of a long day of tearing carpet from the tack strips, as if I had spent the day squashing my hands with rubber mallets; I can still feel the burn on my skin from rolling up the torn carpet into a great burrito, hoisting said great burrito over my shoulder and grimacing as it'd wear my shoulders raw as I lugged it like a dead body into the back of my work truck; I can still taste on my tongue the dust, much of which I imagine was animal excrement and dead skin cells (we shed about 30,000 dead skin cells every minute) as the cutting and the tearing and the rolling turned entire rooms to smog. And, so today as I write for these brands that hire me and pay me handsomely because I'm becoming one of the best in the world at what I do, this past doesn't scare me nor is it a past I'm running from nor is it a past that fuels me to "see how far I've come". It's a past I'm not afraid of returning to. It's a past that allows me to keep writing dangerously, pulling no punches, taking not an ounce of shit from anyone because if the money and the success and the very small amount of notoriety all go away tomorrow, I've known what it tastes like to eat the bottom of the Earth. And, shit and dust and dead skin cells taste like a banana fucking sundae when you get off work at 2 p.m. and get to go home and do what you love... I went pro a long time ago and I'll continue to be a pro whether the world is reading or not, whether I'm getting paid or not, whether I have to tear our carpet for a living or not. Everything else is just cherries on top. But, I digress. By [Cole Schafer](. P.S. Once you've gone pro, [I wrote this guide to help you avoid doing the carpet tearing]( (for too long, that is). [Here's some kerosene.]( Did someone forward
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