Necessary evils of freelancing

One of the necessary evils of being a freelance writer is all the administrative stuff that goes along with it.

Keeping well-organized records is incredibly important. For instance, emails organized in separate folders by client help you to keep track of project details, payment amounts, etc.

I've always been a stickler about keeping records. I save ALL client emails, record each payment in an Excel spreadsheet, save PayPal receipts as PDFs, and scan checks before depositing them. Unfortunately, lately I've gotten to be pretty lax about emails, and as a result my inbox was up to around 6,500 emails by the time I finally went through it last week.

Learn from my mistakes. I spent an entire day going through emails before I finally got my inbox down to about 1,000. A day spent reading old emails, filing, and (sadly) responding to some very old emails from the contact form on my websites that I had missed in all that mess. Luckily, none of them were missed client opportunities, but in a way they were worse: Most were pleas for advice from people who had happened upon my blog on feline hepatic lipidosis.

Don't let your inbox get out of control. It takes a few minutes to answer an email, and a matter of seconds to file where they belong. Much better than wasting an entire day that could have been better spent on billable client work!

New word count meter

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten back to work on my novel since the night NaNoWriMo ended. However, I have found a new word count meter to replace the now-defunct NaNoWriMo widget.

Just in case anyone else is interested in putting a word count meter on their blog the other 11 months out of the year, this is the one I used: another little progress meter

The nice thing about this meter is that it isn't dependent on someone else's website remaining in place, like the last non-NaNo word count meter I used. This one is totally code driven, so if they ever take down their page all you have to do is update the percentages and word count in the code yourself.

Stay tuned for future word count updates!

NaNoWriMo ends!

NaNoWriMo ended tonight with November. I did not make it to 50,000 words, but I gave it a pretty good try. Although my word count was frozen at 40,139, I actually had 41,706 at midnight — I just arrived at the site a little too late to update and validate my word count.

My novel is far from done — I didn't put an ending on it yet, and I have some more of the middle to write as well — so I'll still be working on it for a while. I just finished writing another thousand words, which brings my total word count (including the 3700 words I wrote earlier this year) to 46,440. I want to encourage myself to continue writing even though NaNoWriMo is over, so I'll continue posting word counts here until I finish the first draft.

Here's hoping I'll get better at working on it every day post-NaNo than I was during November!

NaNoWriMo update: The final stretch

Whew! We're down to the last few days of NaNoWriMo. I only added about 2400 words to my total word count today, so I still have 11,000 words to go if I want to "win" this year — which I do. Whether or not that will finish out my novel, we'll have to see, but I have hope!

I'm sorry for not maintaining my blog very well this month. My first year doing NaNoWriMo, I posted my word count on my blog every night, but in my defense I didn't have a horse to visit daily back then! Hopefully, though, in a couple of days I'll have finished my novel, and can put it aside for a little while before I revise it.

One of the interesting parts about this month is how many changes my original plot line and cast of characters have gone through. Three of my characters turned out to be plot ninjas, or perhaps just minor planets demonstrating they have gravity of their own and can therefore influence the trajectory of the story. It meant I was flying blind for most of the month, writing without my outline, but I've decided I actually like the new developments better than my original ideas — I just need to iron out a few of the details.

Those of you who are participating, are you gearing up for a last-minute write-a-thon to get your word count in? How have your novels gone this month — the way you expected, or did you run into problems or changes you didn't plan for?

Snowed under (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo)

It has been a long time since I've posted regularly, and I feel I owe my readers an explanation (or at least, my list of excuses).

For one thing, I've been spending a lot of time with my horse in recent months, particularly since I moved him to a new barn in October, as you will know if you follow my Pony Tales Blog. But on top of that, and on top of my normal workload, this month I am participating in NaNoWriMo — and trying not to sacrifice either work time, or horse time in order to write a novel.

For those of you who aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a novel, or at least 50,000 words of a novel, in the month of November. This is now (in theory) my fourth year of NaNoWriMo, as I "won" (reached 50,000 words) in 2006, and participated (but didn't win) in 2007 and 2008. In fact, I never really wrote anything more than an outline in 2007, and didn't get all that much farther in 2008, either.

You aren't supposed to start the novel until 12:01 am on November 1st, but I'm cheating a bit this year. With my lack of success the last two years, I've decided that it's more important to use NaNoWriMo to help me finish one of the novels I've already started. I also really want to get myself into the habit of writing fiction regularly, as I've been working on it in fits and starts, which doesn't really get me anywhere. Although working on an existing novel is technically against the rules, in my defense I only had about 3,000 words to it when I started NaNoWriMo, and I am dutifully subtracting that word count from the total word count whenever I update my profile.

Of course, this still means that I've got too much on my plate right now, and something has to give. In the first week it was manageable, because I have several regular clients who operate in monthly cycles, and therefore don't give me much work until five or six days into the month. But once the client workload picked up, the novel started suffering — which you can see if you check my progress report. I've had a few good days more recently, though, and I hope to get back on track soon.

If you want to know what my novel is about or read an excerpt, you can do that from my author page. I'll put both of those links in my sidebar, along with a word count widget, so my readers can check up on me and keep me accountable!

The "Make Money Online" myth

As a freelance writer and a work-from-homer, I tend to get pretty annoyed when people ask me, "How do you make money online? I want to do that!"

The owner of the barn where I used to board my horse was the epitome of the type of person who usually gets taken in by these myths. He had retired early, needed money badly, and was convinced that if he gave his email address (and sometimes, his credit card number) to enough people online, eventually he'd find a get-rich-quick opportunity that wasn't just a scam.

How many times have you heard the following questions or statements, either from people you know or those you meet in passing?

"I want to learn how to make money online! Can you help me?"

"How can I do that?"

"So that's what you do — you just write?" (Said as if you just told them you get paid for breathing)

(When you explain what you do) "I can do that! Is there a website you sign up with or something?"

What these people don't seem to get is that for every genuine freelance client, there are 101 scammers just waiting to take advantage of the poor unfortunate souls who can't tell the difference. My old barn owner was forever telling me that such-and-such company had taken money out of his account, or that his inbox was full of spam. In fact, at one point he had tried so had to find a way to make money online that he actually had to change all of his account numbers to prevent the numerous charges that kept hitting his account!

As any successful freelancer knows, writing is a business, and businesses require work. As Wesley says in The Princess Bride, "Anyone who says differently is selling something." Real business opportunities — whether for writing, graphic design, investment banking, or even selling pinatas — don't happen overnight, and usually don't make you rich (quickly or otherwise), either.

My problem is deciding what to tell people that ask these questions. In my experience they are usually somewhat inept, and don't really get it when you try to explain that it doesn't really work that way. What do you usually tell people when they ask you dumb questions like these?

Snow day, slow day

Lately I've been doing what my mom would call "burning the candle at both ends" — I've been spending a LOT of time with my horse and on a doll show my mom and I had to prepare for. Therefore work has been crammed into odd times — not very successfully, either, I might add.

But today was a snow day, which meant I was stuck at home. And despite how much I was looking forward to it — not to mention the prospect of having enough time to get everything done — I found I was quite restless and unable to focus very well for most of the day.

Do you ever find that this happens to you? That when you are busy and out of the house off and on for days or weeks in a row, you find it difficult to come back to your home office and work for an entire day?