While after the changes wrought by nine eleven, I had grown to hate some airports, I loved to fly, and that was one of the best perks of the somewhat unconventional way I supported myself. I had always had trouble holding down a conventional job, probably a combination of stubbornness and being a smart ass. Whatever the reason, over the years I had found I could create a decent lifestyle for myself without actually holding down a job. Perhaps it was a personality disorder, but I would gladly work seventy or eighty hours per week for myself just to keep from having to work forty hours per week for someone else. So one January morning as I sat in the boarding lounge of United Airlines at LaGuardia, I reflected back on the path that had brought me to this point.
It started twenty five years ago. I was a twenty-eight year old man who had just suffered through a divorce from a woman who seemed to think the marriage vows of fidelity and exclusivity, while requirements for most people, were somehow optional for her. At first, I had a real tough go of it financially. The job I had could barely cover the rent and utilities for a little dump of an apartment, my child support and enough left over to feed myself. I couldn't afford to go out to the bars and try to meet anyone, so I pretty much stayed at home in the evenings. One evening, out of boredom more than anything else, I wrote a letter to the editor of the magazine I had picked up in a client's waiting room. They had published an article on customer service that I thought was completely worthless, so I wrote chastising them for publishing such drivel. I even made a couple of specific suggestions about how the article could have been better. I actually got a response to my letter thanking me for writing to them, and they even asked me to call the editor. Since the magazine was in New York and I lived in Washington state, the next morning at seven pacific time, which should be ten on the east coast, I dialed the number. The net result of the conversation was that I was invited to submit an article that incorporated my suggestions, and I was promised that if it met their needs, they would pay me three hundred dollars for the right to publish the article in their magazine.
It didn't take long for me to bang something out on my trusty typewriter. Before I mailed it, I offered my neighbor Sandy Grant, a middle school English teacher, a home cooked spaghetti dinner if she would correct my grammar and spelling. So I did have a tiny bit invested in the story when I mailed it to the magazine. Three days later, the article was in the mail, and ten days after that, I got a contract in the mail for me to sign agreeing to give them what they called first publication rights to the article, and to take their money as compensation for those rights. Of course, I showed that to Sandy and told her that if it was really legit and I really got the money, I would take her out for a real dinner to celebrate. Sandy pointed out that when you read the entire contract, it covered any subsequent articles I might submit to the same magazine over the next year.
According to what she read, if I should submit additional articles and should they choose to publish them, we didn't need to sign additional contracts, they were covered by the same contract. So I immediately banged out two more articles, Sandy did her magic with them and off they went. One was taken as it was, the second was sent back with specific suggestions for writing an article with similar information but from a different point of view. Didn't make a lot of sense to me, but Sandy did some tweaking, then showed me where I had to create some new material. It actually took us ten or twelve hours of work to get the new article to a point where it pleased both of us. It took about sixty days to fit the ten or twelve hours in around our real jobs. That article turned out to be quite a bit longer than the first two, and the check they sent me for it was for eight hundred dollars.
In the meantime, I had also submitted a fourth article that was accepted at the original rate, so by the end of the year, I had a sideline job. I was a freelance writer and had earned seventeen hundred dollars doing that. That was wonderful, but it was the tip of the iceberg. About a month after the first article was published, I got a call from the section editor. Seems that the executive director of one of the professional organizations in that industry, which happened to be public accounting, wanted my phone number. The magazine wanted my approval before they gave it to her.
Of course, I told them it was fine to give out my number, but I really didn't think much about it. Then one of the watershed events in my life happened. At six the next morning, my phone rang. I answered by picking up and mumbling "hello, Dave Preston."
A woman's voice said, "Are you the Dave Preston who wrote the article in how to handle difficult customers in Today's Accounting magazine?"
"Guilty," I replied. "to be calling me this early, you must have really liked it or really hated it. I hope it was the former."
"Oh, my God. I never thought to check. Where do you live?"
"Seattle area. So which is it, love it or hate it?"
"Mr. Preston, I did really like it but I am so sorry to have called you so early. What would be a better time for me to call you back?"
"My alarm is going to go off in ten minutes anyway, and I don't think I will be able to go back to sleep, so how about you tell me who you are and let's talk now?"
"Well," she said, "I'm Pamela Hill and I'm the executive director of a professional organizations of women CPA's. And I did like your article. Would you be available to speak at our national convention the third week of May next year? We are meeting in San Francisco and we have fifteen hundred dollars budgeted for each session speaker. And of course, we will provide airfare and ground transportation to and from the convention hotel, a room and all your meals. Does that fit your speaker fees and are you available that week?"
I was twenty nine years old, I can remember many things back when I was three or four, but for the first time I could remember, I was speechless. Dumbfounded. "Da, let, da, hold on while I get to my desk and check my schedule. Can you wait two or three minutes?"
