You have a job. You work. You get paid. As long as you can keep your job you have the security of getting paid. Business owners face a different challenge. They don’t know how much they can earn each month because each month is a question of maintaining a healthy and prosperous business, and some months the customers or clients or sales just don’t come no matter how much you work.

I am comfortable with a steady job that brings a steady pay, but I dabble in the self-employed field as a freelance photographer and writer. No, I don’t flatter myself. I know my writing lacks much of what I admire in really great writing, and I know there are an uncountable number of photographers with more talent than I have. But I know my limitations and I know my strengths and I try. In my case, I can’t speak about good months and bad months. I speak about years. Last year was my best year to date for getting photographs and writing published. This year has been a usual year with little worth mentioning. I never give up though. To keep me going I always remember the story I heard from a famous photographer and how a small B&W photo of his in a photo magazine got him a very lucrative job with the National Film Board of Canada that led to an unprecedented giant leap in his career. I know I must keep submitting works and hoping someday, someone will be impressed with something small I have done and it will lead to something bigger. As my mom always said, “There is no harvest without first sowing.” And so I sow.

Submitting ideas to magazines is a lot of work. I spend weeks going over the article, trying to make it better than anything I have written before and agonizing over the fact that it sounds the same as always. I spend hours going through thousands of photos sometimes just to select 20 images that I feel best illustrate my article. I send off my work and wait sometimes months and even a year or two hoping that my target magazine will accept my work for publication. Every day that I can, I check my email and inspect the mailbox when I come home, hoping for good news. There are many rejection letters, many more than I’d like. The ratio of rejections to acceptances is about 5:1 for me. Given that I have had about a dozen ideas accepted that means a lot of rejections over the years. I don’t get my hopes up too high. I just do my best and hope that it’s good enough for someone.

Last week someone was suitably impressed. I heard good news, possibly the best I could have expected. On the 6th I sent a submission of ice photographs to a prestigious mountaineering magazine. On the 12th I received a call saying they thought the photographs were very beautiful and that what I had written was “interesting”. My caller told me they wanted to run my short article and photographs in the January or February issue. That was great, I thought. What an opportunity! I was told they would contact me again in October. But last night I received another call. They decided to introduce me in their November issue and another person had been assigned to me and he would contact me soon. What I gather now is that they are thinking to do a profile of me in November and then feature my ice portfolio in January or February. On its own this is a great opportunity. This could be my chance to show all that I have been doing over the last few years, to mention the awards I have won, the writing I have had published, the photographs of Japan that I have had published in magazines abroad, my opinions and observations of the differences in Canadian and Japanese outdoor and mountain photography, and most importantly, it’s a chance to mention the book of alpine photographs in Japan that I am trying to get published. I don’t know exactly what to expect but as I once was told, any publicity is good publicity. I’ll tell all I can and hope to strike another strong chord.

As an additional note, a photo magazine in Canada has also mentioned an interest in featuring my profile as a lead in to publishing articles of mine in the future. The editor likes my ideas and though he hasn’t published anything yet he has not sent any of my submissions back. His last message to me said, “If you don’t hear from me by October send me a message.”

From this autumn it seems I can hope for my career to take two steps forward, each step in one country. I know from experience not to count any chicks before they’ve hatched. I’ll celebrate when I see the work in print.