Tom Durkin always wanted to be a writer, but he probably should have been more specific.
Over his peripatetic career he has traversed many genres, including screenwriting, poetry, advertising, short stories, press/public relations, magazine features, TV commercials, legislative analyses, documentaries and infomercials, essays and op-eds, marketing brochures, political campaign literature, other people’s resumes, book and movie reviews, T-shirts, ghostwriting, legal briefs, script analyses, white papers, technical editing, newsletters, websites, and all kinds of journalism, including photojournalism.
He’s won awards for writing and photography, been fired for refusing to make up quotes, rejected badly edited stories from cheesy publishers, turned down a $100,000 offer to break a Writers Guild of America strike, quit jobs he shouldn’t have, and been turned down for jobs he should have gotten.
His income has approached six figures in good years and almost dropped below four figures in other years. He likes being a freelance writer, but his boss is a financial idiot.
Currently, Durkin writes feature articles for The Union Sunday Express and covers Colfax city government for the Colfax Record, mostly as “community journalism public service” while he seeks the Holy Grail: that magic nexus of getting paid to write what he wants to write.
All he has to do is be more specific about what he wants to write …
Durkin has two websites:
www.vfr.net/~tdurkin/ – a personal, right-brain playground that defies many basic rules of website design because he designed it last century when there weren’t so many rules
www.words4work.net – a professional site offering a resume and portfolio skewed to attract high-paying clients
He can also be found on Facebook and LinkedIn – and frequently, in the real world.