INTRODUCTION
Records are very important. At first, you think, how will I ever forget any of this and in two months time, you find yourself digging through mounds of paper looking for that piece of paper with vital information on and saying, oh, I know it was a piece of yellow paper and it had three phones numbers on it and it's got to be here somewhere. Or you sent out three queries on different aspects of the same story and an editor calls you up and says, yes, we'd like you to go ahead on that article exactly as outlined but we'd like it a couple of hundred words longer than you suggested in your query. Sure, you can ask the editor what your letter said but it would be more professional to be able to refer to your copy of the letter and make notes right on it for future reference.
Yesterday, we talked about setting rates. To keep track of exactly how much you're making, you need to know how much a certain story cost (sometimes there are expenses involved -- postage is a typical expense but there are others...you interview the subject over lunch and you pay, or you have to drive 50 miles to research the project, or you have to buy an admittance ticket to a museum, or you have to pay to have an interlibrary loan...the list is endless). You should also keep some sort of idea of the time involved in a project from beginning to end. I won't even mention the necessity of records at income tax time.
BACKGROUND
One of the hot topics on any writers list is whether to write for free. Some people just won't. I sometimes do. Why? To try out a new idea or as a form of advertising. Once in a while, it's a labour of love. I have had a couple of short stories published in e-zines. No pay involved. But because I'm used to writing non-fiction, I wanted to get past that scary feeling that washes over me at the thought of someone reading my fiction.
In my mind, my fiction is much more revealing of my inner thoughts than my non-fiction is. (This may go back to the first poetry reading I ever participated in. It was at the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown years and years ago. I was in a creative writing class and a number of us performed our poetry as part of a local creative arts festival. I read a couple of my short poems. One made reference to my mother. It was not literally referring to my mother and in any case, it was a benign reference. But the poem was about some teenaged angst and as I read it, my mother in the audience paled and as soon as I finished reading it, she left the room.)
