This week was my final full week as a freelance journalist, at least for the time being. That is if it’s possible to have a full week as a freelance journalist when not working full-time hours.
Anyway, I had three deadlines for features and managed to meet them all. Working to freelance deadlines certainly took a bit of getting used to. Initially, I barely did any work until about four days before the article was due.
I would often wonder why it always felt like such a rush and why I never seemed to have enough time. Then I remembered that I often had three or four weeks after receiving the brief to get the article written.
Occasionally when I get into bad habits, I hear the voices of my old editor and news editor in my head from my reporter days for corrective action. In this case, it was my news editor who used to say: “Always put your calls in first.”
As if by magic, when I was more organised with putting articles together, the deadlines became a lot easier to hit.
I have enjoyed a lot about the life of a freelancer. There has been the variety in workload in writing about various subjects and freedom to choose what hours I work, plus ample time for dog walking.
What I haven’t enjoyed is the uncertainty of it, never knowing whether or not I’ll manage to get any work from one month to the next. I read something on Twitter that freelancing was a constant balance between either taking on too much work or not having enough.
Then there is the matter of invoicing and chasing unpaid invoices. Some publishers are really good at paying within a month of receiving the invoice, but others can take the better part of two months to pay up. There have been others that have taken even longer, and the chasing up can get rather tiresome.
But I know it can work, I know how to put together features, and will probably continue writing the occasional freelance article here and there for stuff that interests me. I also know roughly how much I can realistically earn from it a year. I will save this information for future reference if another viable income stream materialises. Say, one that might involve saying words into a microphone in the hope of receiving laughter.
Based on current statistics, this could take a while. Things are still sluggish in that department, even if this is currently half intended. I did have one gig booked this week, but I didn’t actually end up performing. The gig was an unpaid 10 minutes and 30 miles away. I have no problem with either of these facts ordinarily, as I was going to use it for testing new material. But then came the madness with petrol supplies and I thought it was best to conserve what fuel I did have left in my tank. This is not a metaphor.