All kinds of updates

My Blogger account has had some problems for the last couple of days, so several of my posts didn't appear until today (finally!). Be sure to read everything and catch up!

I have a number of updates:

The Lieurance-King Article Challenge:

Yeah, that SO didn't happen. I've been too busy catching up on PAID work to write marketing articles. However, I hate not finishing things I set out to do, so I'm setting a challenge for myself: To finish my 30 articles by the end of April.

The Inkthinker Query Challenge:

I didn't send off any queries in February, but I did get a couple of in March. I'm up to a whopping 9 queries for the year. Obviously, I have a lot of catching up to do there, too.

My sleep schedule:

You'd be impressed -- when we were visiting Michael's family, I got up as early as 8:00 one day (that's 7:00 in Denver). It was solely to watch/help as Panama got his hooves trimmed, though. Without that kind of incentive here, I'm back to sleeping until 10:30-ish each day. That's not bad, though, considering that a month ago I was going to bed around 5am and sleeping until 1 or 2pm each day.

My work hours:

I never realized how few billable hours I worked every day until I started keeping track. Now that I am tracking it, though, I've been able to make a definite improvement. I'm still only getting about 6 billable hours a day, though; the rest is spent searching for jobs, corresponding with clients, blogging, networking, and doing a hundred other little time-consuming tasks.

My workload:

Going on vacation always screws me up; I always think I can work in the car, and it almost never happens. In other words, when I got back I had lots to do.

There's good news, though. After several crazy days of working almost non-stop since we got back, I have not just caught up on several assignments -- I have also prepared my estimated tax worksheet and figured out how much I need to make in the way of payments this year.

(That's my least favorite part of freelancing, by the way. I can handle filing my taxes, but I hate estimated tax payments. Probably has something to do with all of the dire warnings of the penalties you'll face if you mess up.)

I still have more work to catch up on, but the point is that the list is much shorter. I think that's partly because of my efforts to track my billable hours -- I'm working harder at this than I used to.

All in all, I think that's a positive list of updates. With the exception of those challenges I tried to take on (and failed miserably), I'm doing pretty well.

The Query Challenge

I haven't written about it before now because I've been so caught up with my workload and email problems, but I'm participating in Kristen King's 2007 Inkthinker Query Challenge. The goal is to send off 120 queries or submissions in 2007 - 10 each month, basically. For a full-time freelancer that shouldn't be a problem, but it's more of a challenge than you would think - I don't consider responses to job ads to be queries, unless the "ad" is a call for submissions, and responses to job ads are the vast majority of what I send out.

So far this year, I have sent off five queries. The first one was a query to Write-From-Home.com, offering a reprint of my Writers Weekly article - and I'm happy to say that the query was successful. The next three queries were snail-mailed short story submissions, and the last one was a query for a real estate story. The last one didn't work out, as the publisher didn't want to guarantee anything and I'm too busy right now to write a very custom story and chance not getting paid for it, but hopefully at least one of my short stories will see publication this year.

I encourage everyone to sign up for the query challenge. It should be interesting, trying to come up with 115 more queries. Here are some of my ideas:

* More of my short stories: I have about half a dozen completed short stories that I would like to see published.

* My NaNoWriMo novel: Once I finish revising and editing my novel, I'll start making the rounds with it.

* Ebooks: I have ideas for several ebooks, and a couple of publishers in mind who might be interested in them.

* Articles: I have a whole favorites folder full of submission guidelines pages. My goal is to start going through that and querying for article assignments, in addition to all of the jobs ads I respond to on a daily basis.

This week's edition of Writers Weekly published an article on getting writing assignments that I think might be helpful for other interested in accepting the 2007 Inkthinker Query Challenge. The author has also published an ebook for writers who want to increase their business, which I just might buy.

Good luck to those of you who accept the challenge!