Are We Having Fun Yet?
October 22, 2012
Oh, I see I've been putting yesterday's date on everything I sent out today. Oh well.
As I noted yesterday, I've been doing this full-time freelancing gig for 8 years. And, as I also noted, for the most part I still love it.
"for the most part" is pretty much the key there.
I think it's several hundred times better than my previous job, and that was, if I'm honest, a fairly decent job. Fair pay, lots of paid time-off, holidays, relatively little weekend work, great health insurance, pretty good retirement.
So I traded that for fair pay, no paid time-off, weekend and evening work when necessary, no health insurance, and retirement, what retirement?
So it's not about the tangibles.
I would also point out that the so-called Great Recession has pretty much screwed with job security as a freelancer. It's been significantly more up-and-down than in previous years since 2009, although it's worth noting that one of those years was the best ever.
This year has been okay, not my worst, clearly not my best. I think more to the point of "Are we having fun yet?" is that I started out with several really good clients that more-or-less crapped out after a couple months, one undergoing a fairly significant change in management that left me in limbo I'm still trying to get a handle on. It also left me working with some clients that I think are, frankly, jackasses. And I just have to suck it up and deal with them, because, well, that's life.
So yeah, sometimes fun, sometimes not.
How about you? How's your job?
Oh, I see I've been putting yesterday's date on everything I sent out today. Oh well.
As I noted yesterday, I've been doing this full-time freelancing gig for 8 years. And, as I also noted, for the most part I still love it.
"for the most part" is pretty much the key there.
I think it's several hundred times better than my previous job, and that was, if I'm honest, a fairly decent job. Fair pay, lots of paid time-off, holidays, relatively little weekend work, great health insurance, pretty good retirement.
So I traded that for fair pay, no paid time-off, weekend and evening work when necessary, no health insurance, and retirement, what retirement?
So it's not about the tangibles.
I would also point out that the so-called Great Recession has pretty much screwed with job security as a freelancer. It's been significantly more up-and-down than in previous years since 2009, although it's worth noting that one of those years was the best ever.
This year has been okay, not my worst, clearly not my best. I think more to the point of "Are we having fun yet?" is that I started out with several really good clients that more-or-less crapped out after a couple months, one undergoing a fairly significant change in management that left me in limbo I'm still trying to get a handle on. It also left me working with some clients that I think are, frankly, jackasses. And I just have to suck it up and deal with them, because, well, that's life.
So yeah, sometimes fun, sometimes not.
How about you? How's your job?
posted by Mark Terry at 11:45 AM
1 Comments:
The "work" work is going okay insofar as I don't have to sweat it so much as I creep nearer to retirement age. I'm at the point where I can pretty much afford not to deal with any jackasses that might rear their ugly heads.
As far as the fiction goes we now have two publishers and an agent but are still lacking those big checks!
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