A writer's administrative duties

I had a rather harsh reminder recently not to ignore the administrative duties that comes with being a freelance writer. I used to be on top of my email inbox at all times, but in the last couple of years I have gotten pretty lax about filing client emails and deleting unimportant ones. As a result, my PST file got so big that it locked me out Saturday night.

And unfortunately, since I've also been lax about backing up my work files, I didn't have any recent (as in, newer than 6 months ago) backups.

So I spent about 15 agonizing hours trying to rescue my PST file without trimming off too much of the valuable data it contained. Every time I trimmed it, I also had to scan and repair it, so the process took a while each time. By trimming a megabyte at a time, I finally got a workable file with 10MB trimmed off.

I got lucky and it doesn't seem like I lost much, if anything at all, but I will need to be careful in the future so that it doesn't happen again. This means, however, that I need to be sure not to let myself get so busy that I don't have time for administrative tasks. I found those and housework (especially laundry!) are the first to go when I get really busy, because I sure as heck am not giving up my time with my horse. What do you give up first when you get busy? And how do you manage your time so that the tasks you don't prioritize as high still get done?

Good idea, bad writing

One of my favorite horse blogs, Fugly Horse of the Day, featured an Examiner.com article today. The premise was great — she applied to several horse rescues with made-up financial information, pictures of a property that's not hers, and even a picture of a starving horse she doesn't own. It was a great idea for investigative journalism: One rescue actually approved her, while one only denied her when they saw the picture of the horse. As she pointed out, she could have taken pictures of a beautiful property and a gorgeous horse, and they would have welcomed her with open arms, without ever checking that the property and the horse actually belonged to her.

(I'm linking to Fugly's post, by the way, NOT to the Examiner.com article. You can get there from the blog post if you want to read it, but I don't want to contribute inbound links to that site. Not that it'll make a difference, but still.)

Like I said in the title, great idea... Bad writing. The article was littered with grammatical errors, and lots of bad decisions about when to capitalize. (Seriously! Why do some people capitalize everything that seems remotely important to them?!) The writing also lacked some pizazz — the story was told pretty straightforwardly, but wasn't very compelling unless you really really care about horses. It was a great example of how poor writing can ruin a perfectly good idea.

Furthermore, I'd venture to say it was the wrong forum for investigative journalism. As much as Examiner.com likes to characterize themselves as made up of citizen journalists, I suspect they probably don't allow their "writers" to post anything negative about businesses. They are not a newspaper, so there would be too much pressure on them to take it down.

My irritation with the article made me realize that to me, poor writing trumps what site you write for. Really, if you want to write for peanuts, that's okay. Whatever. Just don't write like you are writing for peanuts!

Associated Content: SOLD!

I've been meaning to update my blog, really I have, but at the moment I have my hands full keeping up with my client work. Thank you to everyone who voiced encouragement on my last post, and know that neglecting my blog right now just means that I'm trying to focus on my other responsibilities.

Anyway, I'm blogging tonight to report a headline, hot off the press (so to speak), that I thought would interest many of my freelancers:

Denver-based web-content firm sold

Yahoo is buying Associated Content for $100 million. (Funny, AC may not believe in paying their writers much, but they sure want top dollar for their business.) Since Associated Content was Denver-based, it's big news here. I wonder if there are any local employees who will be losing their jobs over this — I know AC hires local people for their editing positions, as I interviewed for a position when the company was fairly new, and a freelance friend of mine worked there as an editor for a short time. Plus, an old high school friend of mine knows programmers who work for Associated Content in their Denver office. (They at least are well-paid, although that doesn't say much for the company, in my opinion, as it indicates how poorly they think of writers as compared to code monkeys.)

The Denver Post article includes a blogger's quote that questions Yahoo's decision, pointing out that they are polluting their content with some pretty low-quality stuff. But I can't help but wonder if AC's new owners will be able to raise the standards — and the pay — enough to salvage their reputation.

What are your thoughts? Most of us agree that low-paying freelance work has at least a minor impact on the industry as a whole — and some would argue the impact is pretty major. And Associated Content is a pretty major force in the industry, as it is the longest-surviving content site that I know of. With that in mind, do you think Yahoo's acquisition of the company will be a good thing or a bad thing for the industry in general?

Coming back is hard to do

As many of you know, I've had a difficult month. Heck, in some ways it's been a difficult year. After force-feeding my cat Prince for 5 months, we had to put him to sleep on April 15th. (Now I have yet another reason to hate Tax Day.) And that was following a week that I completely lost thanks to a burn-induced infection in my hand.

Needless to say, April wasn't a good month. I haven't had the heart to finalize the numbers yet, but preliminary counts show I made only about half of my normal income — which would make sense, considering I was out of commission, either from physical complaints or from grief, for 2 weeks out of the 4 ½ that made up the month of April.

Even though that's all over now — my hand healed long ago, and although I still miss my kitty from time to time, I think about it less frequently and with less intensity than I used to — I'm finding it hard to come back. Even though I technically went back to work on the 19th, I've been working only sporadically since then, with a lot of wasted hours and even days.

Yesterday Lori Widmer wrote a post called Do You Have What It Takes?, meaning what it takes to freelance, of course. I've never doubted that I do — I've never minded working late and pulling the occasional all-nighter in exchange for a more flexible schedule the rest of the time, and that sort of thing. But this last month, I've had to wonder: Do I have what it takes? How have I made it 4 ½ years?

I know it's been a pretty extreme month. Most of the time you aren't going to have an infection in your hand followed by having to put your cat to sleep. But we all know how bad luck can all hit at once. Unfortunately, I'm terrible at planning ahead, and I had no reserve to fall back on. My clients have been pretty understanding, but then again the show must go on, and deadlines must still be met. Sometimes I wonder, if this train is going to keep chugging onward, if it's going to roll me right under the wheels.

I'm curious whether my other full-time freelancing friends have had similar experiences, or if it's just me. Have you ever doubted your decision to freelance? Have you ever wondered how you'll make it through some crisis or another with your career still intact?

Juggling acts: Taxes, freelancing, and loss

The confusing, convoluted process that the government makes you go through to file your freelancing taxes never ceases to amaze me. I marvel at this particular one every year:

In order to complete Form 1040, I need to first complete Schedule C, to determine net business income.

In order to complete Schedule C, I need to first complete Form 4562, to determine the deduction I get to take for business equipment.

However, in order to complete Form 4562, I need to know our total gross income for the year, from the 1040.

Why could they not make this a more linear, logical process?

I had the worst April 15th of my entire life, as I had to file taxes and euthanize my beloved cat, who has been with me for 11 years this month, on the same day. As you may know from previous years, I don't usually file at the last minute, but part of the reason has been my intense focus on Prince — I've been force-feeding him for the last 5 months, and although he seemed happy up until he suddenly got dramatically worse a couple of days ago, taking care of him took up a lot of my focus and my energy.

Taxes and freelancing must go on, though. I am not taking any official break from work, though I plan to take it easy over the next few days, and of course the IRS waits for no cat. Check back for a link to my Pony Tales Blog, where I plan to write a longer post on losing Prince.

Unexpected sick days...

...although "sick" doesn't quite seem to cut it.

I had quite the experience last week. Almost the entire week is a blur to me. I slept for most of it, hardly got any work done, and now I'm paying the price (late bills — since I wasn't coherent enough to pay them — and a backlog of all the work I didn't do). Luckily it was a somewhat slow week, but being out of commission for it still kicked my butt.

The story began three weeks ago from tomorrow, when I burned my hand by accidentally pouring boiling water on it while making tea. (The mug tipped while I was pouring and I reached to catch it, forgetting to stop pouring at the same time.) It hurt for a while that day, but not for all that long. I made a lot of trips to the bathroom to run cold water over it for the first couple of hours, but I popped a couple of ibuprofen and pretty soon it was just a bad memory.

The burn wasn't too bad — it didn't blister, just got crispy and peeled like a sunburn later in the week. All seemed fine. Then I started getting an itchy rash where the peeling had started. I'm not too good at not scratching (or not helping the peeling along, for that matter) so I really went to town on it for the first couple of days. Then I thought better of that, and bought some Lanacane to kill the itch.

Bad idea, as it turns out. A day and a half later, I realized my skin was turning red where I was putting the Lanacane, and my hand was starting to get a bit swollen. Oops — I guess I'm allergic? So I switched to Benadryl and started icing it to take the edge off. I also started sleeping a lot — I thought at the time because of the Benadryl, but now I think probably because the infection was getting worse.

By mid-week, I was sleeping quite a bit — after I got up in the morning, I was taking an extended nap during the day, and then falling asleep again around 9:30 in the evening (highly unusual for me). Needless to say, I wasn't getting much work done. On Thursday I went to the doctor and got a prescription for antibiotics, but not much else (including information). On Friday it was still getting worse, so with my hand roughly twice its normal size and no openings at my doctor's office, I went to the ER. An hour and a half later, with an injection of antibiotics in my butt and two more prescriptions to have filled, I was home again.

The story ends well — the swelling was down on Saturday and completely gone by Sunday. I'm off the Benadryl and back on a more normal sleep schedule. Unfortunately, I have a lot of work to catch up on now — which brings me to my point.

Don't be a last minute freelancer. I'm guilty of it more often than I'd like to admit, as I'm sure many people are, but in cases like this it can really come back to bite you in the butt. This time I lucked out, as I had no looming deadlines (those are all this week) and a relatively light workload. But I still would have been much better off if I'd worked ahead the previous week, when I had the opportunity.

What about you? Do you work ahead, or tend to complete projects just under the wire? And has it ever come back to haunt you?

Roll call

Since I had to move my blog to a new address, I've noticed my traffic has taken a nose dive. I'm guessing that might be because a lot of readers were following my blog through Blogger's reader, and now that my feed address has changed, they aren't getting updates. I did set up the old address to forward to the new one, but that won't do anything for the feed.

Have you figured out my blog's new address? If so, please change the links on your own blog and, if you don't mind, post a small announcement so that others can find me again. Thanks so much!