Today I drew Jerilyn Dufresne. Well, not sure how much justice I can do to her story by starting with the part where I came in, but that's all I know.
I first met Jeri in the cast of my second show at QCT, She Loves Me, in which she regularly came in and out as a grouchy old lady. Offstage she wasn't grouchy at all, and the script didn't necessarily call for it, but I could tell she was loving it.
Her name came up again when I returned to Quincy, intent on producing Mason Ellison's play, Better Yet?, as an audio drama. We were still short one cast member, someone to play the therapist. Only in passing did I mention it to the theatre director Brandon, but Jeri's name immediately came to mind for him, and Mason agreed that was perfect.
As I discovered, this wasn't just because she has the warm and kind personality, but because she is in fact a psychotherapist. As such, she spent some of the show's early development gently revising her lines to be more authentic to what a professional would really say. Her scenes were the first part we recorded, and she came back for the Chit-Chat episode with much wonderful insight.
Then when I was in Beauty and the Beast, she worked backstage; helped me with a tricky costume change I had to do, and one night helped me work through an anxiety attack I was having as the show was about to begin... couldn't tell you why that happened to me. If there was a reason to panic, I don't remember what it was. I know that performance anxiety is more prevalent in the general population than the fear of death, but for me, performing in a show that I've been rehearsing for months is the least anxiety-inducing thing I can imagine. Odd.
And our most recent collab was in the student production of The Hobbit, where I was Smaug and she was a few dumb goblins, getting just as into the fight scenes as all the kids.
Our most recent interaction came as a result of my work with my employment specialist. Having lost my dishwashing job, I was feeling that the only thing I could possibly do... is write. Surely there had to be a way, other than making it big, that I could make money with the one thing in the world I don't suck at. Not knowing where to begin, my specialist set me up for a video call with a local writer. It was a bit weird to be scheduled for a business call with my good friend Jerilyn.
For Jeri is the author of the Sam Darling mysteries, currently a nine-book series that's run for as many years -- not annual or anything, the first four all came out in the same year. In our meeting, she told me about how she went about publishing the series; how at first she put the money and effort into promotion and got the series on the bestseller list, but subsequently hasn't bothered, relying on the existing reader base to pick up new installments when they come out; not making a living as an author, just a hefty side hustle.
She confirmed what I had suspected: that freelance fiction writing isn't a thing that people do. Freelance writing focuses on academics and journalism, stuff that's way over my head. People with a story to tell, even those with money to hire writers, tend to believe they can write those stories themselves. I'm not about to assume they're wrong. Ghostwriting exists, of course, but it's a very sus and shady field from all that I've seen.
So... I'm washing dishes again. But Jeri's advice was to write a book. So I'm pondering that as well, alongside all the other stuff we're doing around here.
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