Feast and Famine: Or FAFO

🌟 Editor's Note

I have been absent, if you noticed. If you didn’t, YAY! If you did, well I’ve been on travel, and…the rest is explained below.

When I first began as a freelancer, I was warned that the job would be very “feast or famine.” Tons of work, interspersed by nothing at all. Joy, followed by terror, followed by joy again.

But I’ve come to realize it is not feast or famine. Because feasting implies that you are getting paid, that there is food and gold. Famine implies there is none. But when paychecks for work come weeks or even months after the work itself? Feast doesn’t feel like feast, and famine doesn’t feel like famine.

Nah, freelancing is constantly whirling carousel of Fucking Around and Finding Out.

And I have been Finding Out for weeks.

The Fuck Around

You begin in the Fucking Around portion. Deadlines might be weeks or months away, or you might not have anything in view at all. It’s scary, because as a freelancer you never truly know where a portion of your next paycheck is coming from.

Many of us have bread and butter gigs, often more than one. These are more dependable things, contract writing, podcast production (in my case), or other things (from driving Uber to being a part-time professional singer, which I also am). But they don’t account for your full income, which must be assembled in dribs and drabs, pitch by pitch, outlet by outlet.

To some people this part is excruciating, sending pitches out into the void, often never to hear back, even from editors you’ve worked with before. Sometimes a pitch will be approved, you’ll whip things out on a 48 hour deadline, and your blood pressure will be through the roof…only for the final product to net you about $500. Or less.

The first few days of a Fuck Around portion can be kind of nice, though. You’re tossing pitches out. Finding new, interesting things. Finally catching up on your expenses, knocking things off the to do list that have been loitering on it for months. You might even sleep. Clean the bathroom. Cook something!

It takes a good four days for the fear to set in. Then, suddenly, you begin to realize that nothing has yet come in. Maybe a big feature pitch comes back with the nicest possible version of “we love your work, but this sucks.” Or maybe you hear nothing at all.

Maybe one of your bread and butter gigs falls on hard times, and cuts your hours, or cuts you entirely. Let me tell you, in this year 2025…that’s happening more often than not, especially for those of us who have previously picked up work from government associated groups.

In this portion, desperation creeps in. Maybe in the past 72 hours, every editor you know has realized how much you suck! Maybe every remaining media outlet you can publish in is tanking at the same time!

But this is also, I find, where I begin to get inspired. I dig into a polish a pitch I’ve been meaning to get to for months (some of the pitches on my pitch list are years old. This is not a point of pride). I come up with new ideas, hunt down new leads. In between bouts of crippling self-doubt, I find myself able to focus.

Then, the first “yes” comes in.

Finding Out

An editor replies. They love a pitch!

A bread and butter client pings you, they need something soon! It’s big!

Another yes comes in, and another.

And somehow it happens that all of these yesses are due within the same three week period. They all happen to turn edits around in the same 48 hours, and require your response 48 hours after that.

For some reason two of your deadlines are set for a Federal holiday.

If the first portion was famine, we are now in for a feast. But it’s not a fun feast, with joy and friends and glowing candlelight and your eating pants. There are PARTS of that fun. There’s a turkey leg or two in the reporting, a slice of pie in the sudden inspiration of a killer sentence. There’s a lovely little dollop of cranberry sauce when an editor pops in a comment that says “This is great!”

But you’re still crunching 60+ hour weeks, eating more chocolate than you can afford in 2025 prices, and leaping awake in the middle of the night in terror that you forgot to include a very very important caveat in your piece. You are Finding Out.

Finally, magically…you file your last piece, 11pm on a Friday night. You begin to emerge, blinking, into the light. You remind loved ones that you exist, dust the crumbs off your onesie, and blearily consider exercise and vegetables.

The time has come, you realize, to Fuck Around.

*Yes, I have been Finding Out for the past (checks notes) six weeks. I have emerged. There are still crumbs upon my onesie.

Where have I been?

• Amusingly, I went truly viral for the first time in years a few weeks ago. If you’ve seen the post around Facebook about “condiment udders” that you squeeze to put mustard on your pretzel…it’s me, hi. I’m the problem. You know if I’m going to go viral for anything, this was an excellent choice.

• I got to write for Science News about getting our glow on! Because all living things, it turns out, DO! We produce tiny photons as a byproduct of our metabolism. And no one knows if it matters at all.

• I also got to write about GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Zepbound for National Geographic, and how they might impact people’s fertility. I so appreciate all of my sources, but I especially, especially appreciate the patients who speak to me, who share their often really traumatic experiences. It is not easy to talk about weight, about dieting. It’s really, really not easy to talk about fertility. Thank you so much to Jacquelyn Gill for bravely sharing your story.

Where have you been?

• You may have heard about rats catching bats mid flight. Yes, amazing. Yes. Horrifying. But you know those rats aren’t alone. BATS, it turns out, can catch sparrows in flight too! But of course, bats fly by echolocating. Which means…there they are, mid chew, chirping with their mouths full so they don’t run into walls. I love it.

• I love that Science, being Science, didn’t just assume chatGPT was good or bad. They tested exactly how well it could write science. They found that it could summarize. But it could not provide context, it could not analyze. ChatGPT could be a science writer, but it wouldn’t be a good one, it would be relentlessly mediocre to bad.

• If you’ve ever shouted at a seagull stealing your chips and had it fly away…well congrats your work is backed up by science now.

• James Watson, one of the two men credited with the discovery of DNA, has died. This obituary, written four years ago by the amazing writer Sharon Begley before she herself passed away, is the only one you need to read.

• A great, but depressing, read on how independent, reader-funded individual patronage journalism just isn’t going to work.

• Woodpeckers put their whole body into every blow…and even exhale on each blow like the best trained HIIT workout you’ve ever seen.