Horse racing and erotica: How I survived the fickle world of freelance writing

The Guardian

6 hours ago

When people ask what I do for a living, I'm faced with two choices: either I can lie or I can bore them with the truth, which is too complicated to explain succinctly. While those around me have normal, definable jobs – accountant, journalist, engineer – my work requires headings and subheadings to get it across properly: a map of overlapping gigs and contracts.
'What do you do?' It's a simple question, and one that often gets asked on first dates. No matter how much I pare down my reply, it's always long-winded.
'Well, I'm a freelancer,' I start, 'so I have a million little jobs …'
The first of my million little jobs is what I call 'Horse News'. It works like this: every weekday morning I wake up at 6am and make my way to my desk, stumbling and still half asleep. I flick on an old lamp and wince as my eyes adjust to the light. I turn on my computer and use a piece of software that shows me all of the American horse-racing-related news from the past 24 hours. It pulls up radio clips, Fox News segments and articles from publications called BloodHorse or Daily Racing Form – anything that could be relevant to my interests.
I sift through countless story summaries, many of which sound fake. 'Army Wife defeats Crazy Beautiful Woman in race!' 'Another doping scandal emerges in Northern California!' 'A disgraced-but-very-good trainer is no longer banned from the track!' 'A famous YouTuber has invested millions into a betting app!' I compile the important stuff into a newsletter: stories about track renovations, big events, the series of horse laws that were passed, then repealed, then approved again in 2023.
This is a real thing. These laws (known as the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act) are meant to keep racehorses and jockeys safer. Tracks are required to provide on-site vets and doctors and to follow standardised safety protocols. But it is much cheaper, it turns out, to ignore the laws and have the horses race in dangerous conditions. Vets and safety gear are expensive, which is upsetting to the billionaires who own the racetracks. And so certain states have fought these laws, calling them unconstitutional. I have followed along, every step of the way.
When the newsletter is finished, I send it to my client, a company that owns race tracks across the US. Though, to be clear, I don't work for them directly. I work for a reputation management firm. This company's entire purpose is to monitor the news for other companies, keeping tabs on what the public is saying about their clients and the major trends in those industries. I didn't know this was a real job until I started doing it.
I got this job the way I've gotten most of my jobs: through an acquaintance who heard I was looking for work. This is key to success in freelancing. You just need to build a roster of industry connections who know how desperate you are.
'It's just an hour per morning,' she told me. 'Usually less.'
'Sure,' I said, still not understanding what I was agreeing to. 'I'll do it.'
The reputation management firm has a slew of different clients, each of whom want a customised newsletter about their industry. There's a fast food chain, a brewery, an environmental organisation. But I was assigned to the horse-racing client. And so I keep up with the Horse News and the Horse Laws. By 7.30am, the report is done and I go back to bed.
The Horse News makes me feel like a bad person sometimes. Racing is an odd, archaic and often cruel sport. The more I read about it, the more convinced I become that it should not exist. I root for the Horse Laws, and grow sad when a state bucks against them. The thing about Horse News, though, is that someone has to compile it. It might as well be me.
I got the offer to do Horse News not long after I moved to Montreal, at a time when I needed work more than ever. I was 24 and a full-time adult now, tasked with the question of how I planned to fill my time and make a living.
A year and a half earlier, when I'd finished my undergraduate studies in English and creative writing, I had immediately enrolled in another creative writing programme. I wish I could say this was entirely because I was devoted to my craft or that it was my life's dream to write a book, but that's only a small part of the truth. The main reason I joined a master's programme was because I didn't want to face what life would look like once I was no longer a student.
As I got closer to finishing my undergrad, I kept getting asked what came next. For years, the question of what I was going to do when I grew up had been answered the same way: I'm going to be a writer. This was an answer that adults found cute when I was a child, and concerning as I got older. A writer, they echoed, mulling the word over slowly. Interesting. By the time I got to university, it was an answer that felt downright unacceptable. Sharing dreams about writing for a living elicited looks of mingled confusion and pity. A writer?
I understood that being a writer was fraught. I understood that it was a hard way to make a living. There were no jobs in the industry, and books didn't sell for as much as they used to. And so, the question of what I wanted to do after graduating was one that made me physically sick, because I didn't know what being a writer meant either.
I decided the solution was grad school. If anyone dared to ask me what I was doing after that, I could shrug and tell them I had a few more years to think about it.
My plan worked for a year, though not exactly as expected. First, the pandemic hit and I moved to Nova Scotia with my now ex-girlfriend. Then, I became disabled. I developed a nerve condition that became chronic. Pain had spread through my neck, my arms, my hands. When it first started, I couldn't type at all. I had to readjust every aspect of my life: how I cooked, how I brushed my teeth – and how I worked.
By the second year of the programme, I had moved to Toronto, but I was still struggling with voice-to-text and barely able to keep up with basic assignments. The thought of writing a thesis – an entire book – felt impossible. I was also writing freelance articles on the side to help pay my rent and I simply couldn't do both, mentally or physically. Forced to choose between work and school, I chose work. So I took medical leave, saying I would return in a year but unsure if I actually would.
Leaving school meant I had to face the question of who I was, if I wasn't a student, much earlier than anticipated. Without a schedule filled with classes to attend and readings to do, I was just a person with an empty calendar and one and a half arts degrees.
'What're you going to do now?' a friend asked over beers at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Toronto. I dragged a chip through guacamole. 'I don't know, to be honest. I mean, I'll work, obviously.'
'I'm sure you could get an office job somewhere,' she said. 'Or go back to being a barista, maybe.'
People kept suggesting jobs to me like this. Why don't you just become a barista? A cashier? A secretary? Every time, it was a sharp reminder of how little they understood my physical limitations. I'm too disabled for that, I wanted to say.
I held my tongue, but it was true. My pain was so crippling at this point that I struggled to perform basic tasks around the house. I knew I was no longer able to do most of the jobs I'd had in high school or when I was an undergrad: I couldn't work as a barista, my forearms too weak to tamp down espresso grounds, nor in retail nor as a waitress, as the weight from my own dinner plate at home was enough to make me wince with pain. As I scrolled through job postings for office work, I knew a nine-to-five wasn't feasible either. I needed the kind of flexibility a job like that wouldn't allow: the ability to take long breaks when I was in too much pain, to shift deadlines, to use tedious and time-consuming adaptive technology. Back then, I was in so much pain I could barely use a mouse, commanding my entire computer with my voice. Open Google Chrome. New tab. Copy that. Paste that. In addition to being annoying in an office setting, it just wasn't fast enough.
'I think I'll just write,' I told my friend. 'Like I've been doing, but full-time.'
She blinked at me. 'Will that be enough?'
I understood the question. I'd enjoyed the freelance writing I'd done, mostly penning articles about health and pop culture for Canadian outlets and the odd American one. It paid poorly and inconsistently.
For a long time, I'd thought of this freelance work as a stepping stone to a real job as a writer or an editor, with a salary and benefits. Now, it seemed like going all-in on freelancing was my only real career option. It was the only way, I thought, that I could truly work on my own schedule and tend to my needs without falling short of employer expectations.
'I'll manage. It'll work out, I'm sure of it.' I'd never been less sure of anything.
In the weeks that followed I launched myself into freelancing, pitching an endless stream of articles and essays to my editors. I was lucky to have a few people who championed my work and encouraged me to send them my ideas. I'd never met any of them in person, which was strange: they felt fake to me, just email addresses that provided me with opportunities and pay cheques. There had been even more, in the past – editors I'd worked with and felt comfortable contacting – but many had faded away, either leaving the industry or simply starting to ignore my emails.
As I started writing more freelance pieces, I was, in a way, living the life I'd always wanted. I was a writer. It was my actual job. I balanced deadlines, rotating between articles and editors. I sent out more and more pitches. I worked late into the night, fuelled by instant coffee and bad music.
It wasn't enough. The number of pitches I was landing couldn't comfortably sustain me. And it often took ages for me to get paid for my work. A fully written article might be put on hold – it would sit and collect virtual dust, and I wouldn't be paid until it was published. I knew I needed more consistent work. I longed for some sort of pay cheque I could rely on month to month. My savings dwindled as I paid for rent, pricey physiotherapy appointments and adaptive tools. I moved to Montreal, where the cost of living was cheaper, but I still struggled to get by.
This was when Horse News entered my life. As I settled into my new city, I was shown the ropes of this strange job: how to use the monitoring software, how to identify stories worth including in the newsletter, who the big players in Horse World were. I was promised hourly pay, with a lump sum deposited into my account at the end of each month. And I suddenly became aware of the possibility of odd jobs that were writing-adjacent – the kind of unglamorous work that would pay the bills while allowing me to keep writing on my own schedule.
In the coming months, other odd jobs entered and exited my roster. I wrote Instagram captions for a hospital foundation. I wrote online content for a bank (which always paid me late and said it was because they couldn't figure out how to transfer the money, which made me grateful it was not my bank). Importantly, I wrote a column where I recapped episodes of The Bachelorette. I was constantly writing some odd article for a different publication. Throughout all of this, Horse News was the only stable work I had. Every weekday, without fail, the horses raced on and I compiled my newsletter.
As new opportunities presented themselves, I found myself unable to say no to work. No matter how busy I was or how strange the job was, I accepted every single offer that came my way, worried the gigs would eventually dry up.
In early summer, as Montreal's unbearably cold season gave way to an unbearably hot one, I got a text from a friend. She worked at a major Canadian newspaper – which, she said, wasn't paying her enough. She'd taken on a side gig to compensate for the poor salary. She'd heard I was looking for work, and thought I might be interested.
'What is it?' I texted.
'Writing erotica,' she answered.
The next week, I had a Zoom meeting with someone who worked at the company. She was young, in her late 20s, with pink cheeks and glossy blond hair. She explained that she needed writers for an app she was running that was like a choose-your-own-adventure story, only hornier. Users, mostly women, would select a story and start reading. They were all written in the second person, placing users in the protagonist's shoes: You walk into a restaurant … You see a hot guy sitting at the bar … What will you do next? They were then presented with two choices.
One would be boring (ignore the guy!), and the other would be depraved (ask him to go back to your place and [redacted]!). Choosing depravity cost $0.99. These stories were long, most of them basically novels.
New chapters came out every week, each instalment getting increasingly risque. This was a business strategy: users became invested in a story, and were then charged money to read the new material.
'Do you think you'd be able to keep up with it?'
'I think so.'
I agreed to write one or two chapters per week. Each would be about 4,000 words long and the story would ultimately have at least 20 chapters. I would get paid US$120 for each chapter.
If I had worked this out or thought about this critically, I'd have realised this was a very bad idea. It was a monumental amount of work and creative energy to expend for pretty poor pay, especially as someone who couldn't type very much. Unfortunately, I was distracted by how fun the work sounded. Like many young women who grew up with the internet, I had lived through the days of reading whatever perverted and poorly written erotica I could find about my favourite fictional characters. The prospect of now becoming a professional erotica writer was too enticing to turn down. Plus, if my friend was balancing full-time newspaper work with this, how hard could it be?
The woman who would become my editor nodded.
'The categories that perform best right now are domination, stepbrother and campus stuff. You know, student-teacher situations?' She looked through a printout of figures and nodded. 'Vampire and werewolf stories are making a resurgence, too.'
I jotted this down in a notebook, my handwriting messy and quick. Campus, werewolf, domination. 'Got it.'
'By the way, the app store won't let us use the words penis, vagina or cock,' she said flatly.
'Oh,' I said. 'Why not?'
'Terms of service stuff.'
'Got it.'
'Read a few of the stories for inspiration on how to work around this. You'll get the hang of it.'
'Right.'
'People get really creative. Fruit works, sometimes.'
'Fruit?'
'You'll see what I mean,' she said. 'And you'll need a pen name. Unless you want to use your own?'
I shook my head. 'I'll find a pen name.'
That afternoon, I sat on my friends' balcony. I told them about my new job, which would somehow slot in alongside all the other jobs I was doing. It was one of the first truly warm days of summer, and we were determined to spend the entire thing outside. Between sips of iced coffee, we plotted out my story chapter by chapter, my friends enthusiastic about its trajectory.
'Maybe she can hook up with her roommate?' I suggested.
'Yes, that's great,' John said. 'Make it a love triangle.'
He dragged a finger through the air, drawing a triangle.
'I can't believe you're writing porn,' Maria said, leaning back in a wooden folding chair. 'How fun.'
'Not porn. Erotica.'
'Same difference,' John said. He pulled the notes I'd scrawled towards him and squinted. 'OK, what happens next?'
By the end of the day, John and I had plotted out an entire story arc: the student and the TA's tumultuous affair; the way they were almost found out; the forces that almost pulled them apart. Ultimately, love and sex brought them back together.
'This is basically an entire romance novel,' John said.
'Smuttier, though.'
'Of course.'
'And worse.'
Maria spent the day brainstorming pen name ideas, which she would occasionally pipe up to suggest. Madame Scarlett? Delilah Rose? Candy Mae? Jolene Fox? 'What kind of vibe are you looking for, anyways?'
Now, my days looked like this: I woke up at 6am and did the Horse News; I hammered out whatever freelance writing assignment I was working on; I wrote erotica; I ended my workday around 5pm, tired and achy.
In the coming months, I sat in my hot, un-air-conditioned apartment, sweating and damp, and wrote between 3,500 and 8,000 words of smut per week. Since I was doing this with voice-to-text, I had to keep my windows closed, mortified at the thought of my neighbours hearing me speak vile things into my computer: words like member, length, girth and sometimes the names of fruit.
I worked on one story throughout the whole summer.
On weeks when, for whatever reason, I couldn't keep up – say, my hands were worse than usual or I got too busy with other work – my boss at the app was understanding.
Your health is more important than this, she would say. Rest. It was the most compassion I'd ever gotten from an employer, which was nice but also annoying. Part of me hoped to be fired, freed entirely from my contract. But no – these people were, unfortunately, sweet and thoughtful.
Within a few weeks I had come to hate the work. Though it was fun in the beginning, it quickly lost its charm, the sex scenes becoming tedious and exhausting once they were no longer new to me.
'There are only so many ways to write 'they had sex', you know?' I told Maria one day.
She shook her head. 'I really don't.'
The biggest problem was just that I was overworked. Writing that much sapped all of my creative and physical energy, leaving me unwilling or unable to write much else.
When I neared the final chapter, my friends and I sat around with a bottle of wine and celebrated the fact that my life as an erotica writer was almost done. They suggested words and phrases I should try to sneak into the final chapter as a little personal challenge: cornucopia, sledgehammer, pumpernickel, Seinfeld, Donna Tartt, the Watergate scandal.
Maria squinted at John. 'That last one is too silly,' she said. 'She won't be able to manage it.'
'Have faith,' I said.
I managed them all, laughing along the way as I tweaked the story to include them.
By the time it was done, I'd written more than 70,000 words of smut. My editor asked if I wanted to renew my contract and I declined. She insisted, saying we could alter the work schedule, maybe even up my pay by another $5 per chapter.
My story, she revealed, was gaining a devoted following, quickly becoming one of the most popular on the app. This felt nice – my anonymous magnum opus. Still, I said no.
As time passed in Montreal and I did more odd jobs, my hands were getting marginally better. This meant that, as long as I was very careful and worked within a strict set of limitations, there was one more type of work that became available to me again: cartooning.
I'd loved drawing since I was a kid. Growing up, I drew countless pictures of animals (especially birds), carefully copying them from the books I begged my mom to buy me.
When my pain first started in 2021 and I realised I would have to take a months-long break from drawing, it had been a particularly tough blow. Drawing wasn't as big of a part of my income or my identity as writing was, but it still mattered to me immensely. What felt worse was the fact that, a month before I lost the ability to draw, I'd sold my first cartoon to the New Yorker – an accomplishment I'd worked towards for years, and which I worried I might never be able to repeat.
Now, in my very ergonomic home office, I could draw again (though I needed to set a timer beforehand to make sure I didn't work for more than 20 minutes at a time).
When the timer went off, I'd stand and stretch and take a break. I limited the amount of projects I took on so I wouldn't overdo it. However, every now and then I pitched a cartoon to the New Yorker, or accepted a commission request for a portrait of someone's dog.
Cartooning became a very small part of the tapestry of odd jobs that came together to make up an income. But it was one I was happy to be able to include.
On dates, I try to condense this all into a short spiel. I'm a writer. I do the Horse News. I'm a copywriter. I also draw cartoons, sometimes, but that's neither here nor there. Even this has omissions, but it's the best I can do.
'Wouldn't you rather just have a normal job?' one date – a lawyer – asked.
It's something I've wondered myself. Sometimes, looking at overlapping assignments and deadlines on my Google calendar, I feel overwhelmed and exhausted. But when I'm in pain, I can take a break in the middle of the day, or even go back to bed if I need to.
'This suits me best,' I said.
I ended that date early, as I do all weekday dates. I have a great excuse: Horse News is due at 7.30 tomorrow morning.
Excerpted from Look Ma, No Hands by Gabrielle Drolet. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
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