Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
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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.