Pretty Gigs All in a Row
Back in September, I wrote about “The Season of the Pitch.” In that, I mentioned that one of challenges with freelance writing is that right after you sign contracts for one gig you often wind up getting contacted about a better, shinier assignment. After you’ve spent so much time beating the bushes to flush out these choice pieces of work, it’s hard to turn them down. After all, if you didn’t want to do them, you wouldn’t have pitched for them in the first place, right?
Let me state, though, that this is an excellent problem to have. It’s hard to complain about having too many cool things to work on, especially when others may be struggling to find anything to work on at all.
So don’t. Sit your butt in the chair and get the work done instead. You can sleep when you’re dead—or at least when you’re done. Sooner or later, the season of the pitch will come around again, and you’ll wonder where all those people who piled work on you last year have gone.
Of course, that’s easier to say than do. Life tends to crop up and suck up time too. For instance, I just spent a few hours in the local ER with my son Ken, who sliced open his hand on a fireplace door, a wound that required nine stitches to repair. He should be fine, although he’ll have a nice scar to show off later.
The point is that you can’t plan for things like that. They happen, you deal with them, and you get back to work as soon as you can. Good editors will understand if such things make you a little late.
However, if you dodge emails and phone calls for weeks while you juggle projects and scramble to catch up, those good editors will turn on you—the way they should. There’s little worse to an editor than to wonder if she needs to recommission something that might show up completed the next day.
So, if you get behind, be sure to be up front about it as soon as you can. Apologize, offer solutions, and keep moving.
It’s better yet, though, if you can figure out a way to hit those deadlines, no matter how fast they keep coming at you. Doing this requires discipline, self-knowledge, a calendar, and a calculator.
Your self-knowledge tells you how much work you can get done in a given stretch of time. Keep a record of how many words you write each day, both under the worst and the best of circumstances. You’ll need this information later.
Use your calculator to figure out how many days each project in your pipeline should take. If you can write 5,000 words per day on a good day, and you’re tackling a 100,000-word book, then that should take you about 20 days to complete. Of course, that assumes you can string together 20 good days in a row. Some will be better than that, and others will be worse, but this should give you at least a rough idea of how much time you need.
Then take up that calendar and plot out those days you need. Don’t forget about weekends and holidays. You can sacrifice those breaks when you find yourself in a crunch, but try not to do that to yourself too often. That way lies burnout, which is the last thing you need when you’re hoping to beat your deadlines.
Once you’ve done all that, focus on your discipline to make sure you stick to your plan. A plan’s no good if you ignore it, no matter whether your excuses are excellent or not. Keep at it, and soon you’ll find yourself on the other side of the crunch—and with a stack of shiny new credits (and corresponding payments) to wait on.
