I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
The Shards of Excalibur audiobooks, narrated by the wonderful Elizabeth Klett, are now available again after being off the market for a short while. Best of all, while they’re once more on Audible.com and Audible.ca, you …
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Sometimes being a freelancer sucks
Take today, for instance. I just found out that a major project I thought I would be writing has fallen through…and it was one I was really looking forward to. (No, I hasten to reassure you, not the sequel to Marseguro: as far as I know, Terra Insegura is still a go.)
And it’s not as if I don’t have lots of stuff to keep me busy, which is one reason I’ve been a bit lax posting on here this week. But when you only get paid when you drum up work for yourself, losing a gig you thought you had is annoying.
Grrr. Guess I’ll take it out on my keyboard.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2007/11/sometimes-being-a-freelancer-sucks/
3 comments
Definitely beats a real job, but there are some days…
I hear you. The way projects collapse in on themselves always astonishes me. I can carefully plan out having this done by this date, and that done by that date, and then I’ll be in good shape to do the next thing…but somehow when it all shakes out everything has to be done at once. And then, all of a sudden, you hit a drought and have no paying work at all.
Oh, well. I suppose it still beats a real job… 🙂
Ain’t that the truth. My dilemma is sort of similar. I signed a contract for 3 projects way back in January with one of my clients. They paid me 50% upfront on all of them. Two are completed and totally paid for. The third project should have been done in September. Due to one reason or another, my client, that does a lot of surveys, first was late in doing their surveys, then their in-house stats guy quit, then they farmed out the stats on this project and for some reason he can’t seem to actually get this stuff done.
So I do other stuff, just convinced they’re going to e-mail all the data for this 90 page report at some last-minute date and say, “Oh, we’re in a rush, can you finish it by next week?”
Drivin’ me nuts.