My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [83]
Making time for the work you really want to do is about making choices and compromising when you have to. Some freelancers budget an afternoon or day each week for tapping their creative vein, like web designer Colleen Lynn, who, as you saw in Chapter 17, reserves part of each Friday for her creative work. Others flit from three-month bread-and-butter gig to three-month creative stint and back again. And some get the bulk of their annual creative work done during a few weeks a year spent at an artists’ retreat. I’ve tried all these ways, and after more than a decade, I’m still trying to strike the perfect balance of cash flow and creativity.
The key is to avoid driving yourself—and everyone within ear-shot—crazy by wailing about how broke you are, not to mention quashing your creative drive with all that financial terror. There are dozens of recipes for striking that balance between art and commerce. So experiment. Mix and match. And don’t be afraid to get creative about how you finance and make time for getting your creative kicks. Because the only person who can tell you what strategy will work best for you is you.
epilogue
I Am Freelance (and So Can You!)
As you work to get your freelance life on track, a number of external forces may conspire to keep your creative soul train from leaving the station. For one thing, there will be all manner of naysayers, as there are any time anyone endeavors to do something unconventional (say, invent their own job). Don’t let these killjoys derail your dream of working solo. Instead, make it your mission in life to see just how fast you can prove them wrong.
If I had listened to my family, my college advisers, and even many of the friends I’ve made over the years, you wouldn’t be reading this book right now—mainly because I’d be working some full-time office job instead of working from home in three-day-old jammies. Instead, I’m with artist Nikki McClure, who says, “To me it’s about making your own economy, and that’s about disregarding the common way of making money.”
Not everyone will be a naysayer. In fact, many people will be excited, encouraging, and brimming with ideas about how you should pursue the freelance path, from your postal carrier to your cat. They’ll all have multiple unsolicited suggestions about the “right way” to run a business of one. But just because your aunt Barb saw Oprah say that her BFF Gayle told her that her accountant says that you need to incorporate your business from day one and hire an army of life coaches to tell you how to grow your creative empire doesn’t mean you should listen.
There are more obstacles out there, too—some of them lurking within, including those pesky business mores we think we’re supposed to abide by simply because they existed at some point in time, like back when people traveled by horse and buggy. For example, I used to think it was more professional to not let on that I was calling clients or story sources at a desk just twenty paces from my bed (for some reason, people do ask where I work all the time). Now if it comes up, I say I’m freelancing from my home office.
Likewise, I’ve gone from sweating the fact that my dog has a nasty habit of launching into a barking fit when I’m on a conference call or being interviewed on live radio to laughing it off with a joke about my low-rent security team. And while the mompreneurs I’ve talked to over the years do their darnedest to make sure their kids aren’t screeching in the background