Self-Employment – Page 9

May 2, 2014Self-Employment Writing

Battling the Robots

Robots have been driving me nuts recently. Two specific kinds of robots, actually.

First, there’s the kind all journalists know about: the human PR robot who refuses to answer the question you just asked them. Sometimes this is fine. Even if their language is painfully robotic, you really just need them to say something, and you can fill in the narrative around their quotes. Other times, particularly when you’re trying to report on something in depth that asks “how” or “why” something happened, it ruins the entire interview. If you ask a question that should be answered beginning something like, “Well, this one day, Tom said to Mary, ‘I’ve got a great idea!’ And the first thing they did was…” and instead the answer begins, “As a company Big Brand has always been committed to supporting great ideas…” that is not anything. It’s robot sludge. It’s definitely not a story.

April 30, 2014April 30, 2014General Life Whatnot Self-Employment Writing

Freelancer Fears: Money talk

Talking about money is the wooooooooooorst. Even as freelance writer who must measure absolutely everything I do by how much it pays if I want to eat and sleep inside, it kills me to broach the subject of pay. I’m not alone on this. For whatever reason, most Americans not only don’t talk about their finances, they’d prefer to discuss politics, religion or death over money. Multiply that Americanism by being Midwestern, and talking about payment with publishers is practically paralyzing for me.

My professional money talk anxiety began decade ago (a decade ago!), when I wrote a weekly bar review column for a local paper in Lansing. Every week, I went to a bar, wrote my little thingy, and I’d get a $60 check in the mail. One week, it didn’t come. I decided to wait and see if it was late. When my next check came on schedule, followed by the next — with no mention of the missing funds — I panicked. I was 22, living paycheck to paycheck. I really needed that $60. How could I ask for it? What if they just thought that bar review was super bad and decided not to pay me for it? What if the error was on my end and now it was too late to fix? What if my editor thought I was stingy for making a thing over $60 and then hated me and stopped giving me work and my dream of writing for a living was dashed? Over $60?!

April 25, 2014April 25, 2014Self-Employment

The joy of amateurism

You know what I love? Doing things I’m only OK at doing. Below average even. It’s really the best.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to be the absolute best at what you do, which is often a trademark quality in freelancers and entrepreneurs of all kinds, you know the incremental improvement game: hours and hours and hours of every day are spent focused polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing the same skill/product/business you’ve been polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing for the past bazillion days. It’s exhausting. Of course it’s rewarding and fulfilling and all that too, but today, we’re acknowledging that it’s exhausting too. Come on, A-typers, you can admit it.