At the end of last year, many might have heard her name for the first time as a fiction writer, when she received third place in the inaugural Poetavango Award for Short Story with her story “Reality for Sale”. Despite her busy schedule, I managed to get an interview with her.
I asked her what her typical day consisted of. “Freelancing has its calm, lazy days and crazy, busy days,” she said. “A calm, lazy day would be spent hunting down story ideas, writing pitches and waiting for story approvals from my ‘bosses’. ….How crazy-busy a day becomes depends on which agency I’m dealing with at a given time, worst still, if it’s that nightmarish day in which I have to submit to at least two agencies. The craziest days are days wherein I am submitting a video story with the shelf life of a banana – in contrast to a magazine video. It means being at the event way before time just so I shoot some cutaways and establishing shots, after which I cover the event, interview people on the side-lines, rush to my work station to edit the footage…After editing the footage, I write the script to accompany it. The most annoying part with video packages is having to transcribe what the speakers (sound bites) are saying word for word.
