Freelance Crossroads and the Journeyman Writer

At the junction of practicality and professionalism, it can be difficult to know the direction in which we should venture forth. I found myself at such a crossroads recently, although I didn’t arrive suddenly, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve not been at the same intersection before.

“I miss writing, though,… and I think that means something.”

I’ve been writing and finding joy in writing since I was of some single-digit age. In perhaps grade five or six, I was regularly churning out serialized episodes of a superhero story involving a cartoon protagonist I’d stolen from a cheap but locally recognized television commercial campaign (“Captain Colortyme”).

I liked writing it, and my friends liked reading it. They would pester me to hurry in finishing the next installment, and I would take an uncharacteristic pride in seeing them eagerly await their turn to read my hand-scrawled notebook pages of text.

It was probably then, or at some unnamed time before that when a teacher praised an assignment or when I excelled at a writing exercise, that I began to believe I was better than average at…