Although I consider myself a consummate professional in my career life—including dealing with fellow writers—I’ll confess a wee bit of fan-girl glee at having the opportunity to grill author Michelle Goodman about her new book, My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire. Michelle is a great example of, well, what most freelancers hope to achieve. She’s not only a successful freelance writer—contributing regularly to various prestigious news outlets, and having had her creative works published as well—she’s also written two how-to books in the last couple of years. By all accounts, Michelle has cracked the code.

Naturally, I felt the need to pick her brain. And she was kind enough to indulge me.

Today’s segment deals with some of the philosophical issues inherent in being a freelancer, and also the business of being a book author on a tight schedule.

Mir Kamin: I love that the very first chapter of My So-Called Freelance Life is about having a business plan (and I say that as someone whose business plan for the first 18 months of freelancing was something like “get paid to write stuff”). How do you know when it’s time to revise that business plan? How does a freelancer separate out signs of general burnout from signs that it’s time to switch up your goals?

Michelle Goodman: I suggest revising that business plan—which, as I say in the book, can be written on the back of a beer coaster if you want—at least annually, preferably every six months, just to make sure you’re thinking about the type of clients, projects, and industries you want to get involved with and the steps you’ll take to make that happen. Freelancers get so caught up in the day-to-day of finding work and making deadlines that it’s easy to push our goals to the wayside and just say yes to every project that comes our way, regardless of whether it fits in with our master plan for world domination and regardless of whether it makes us feel like we’re actually getting somewhere in our freelance career, both professionally and financially.

As for the second part of your question, it can be hard to separate the burnout that comes from working too much for a fixed period of time (say, when you’ve taken on a high-paying, month-long, 50-hour-a-week project for one client and desperately need a day off) from the burnout that comes from actually needing to change business strategies, niches, or industries after spinning your wheels for a couple years and getting bored silly. If you’re feeling fried, take at least two days off (preferably three or four) as soon as you can afford to. Don’t even check your email during this time. Sometimes all you need for work to become enjoyable again is to replenish the well, so to speak. But if you’re finding that no amount of time off can restore your joy for the job, it’s probably a sign that you need to branch out in a different direction for sanity’s sake.

Mir: This recent post at FreelanceSwitch about freelancers sharing knowledge had me nodding all the way through. You’ve made a niche for yourself in the how-tos of freelancing — so obviously you believe in that knowledge-sharing — but what about freelancers who aren’t in the business of helping others? Do you think it’s possible to thrive as a freelancer without being a supportive/helpful member of the freelance community?

Michelle: The item in that post on shunning the “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us” mentality is the aspect of it I like the most. (As for the item on being psyched that someone copied your work because it’s flattering—WTF? Clearly that poster is not concerned about money and credibility lost over copyright infringement. That’s just bad advice, especially coming from a designer. Passing off someone’s work as your own is never cool and can get you in a lot of trouble, as it should. But reprinting someone’s work with permission—and, I would hope, compensation? Now that’s flattery. But I digress.)

I find that far more freelancers are willing to band together with their “competition” than shut them out (or rip them off). That’s not to say you have to share your entire contact list with everyone you meet or give away all your trade secrets or ideas. But a little mutual back scratching goes a long way. Help a freelance pal answer a burning question about how to handle a problem client and she’s likely to do the same for you later on down the line. Pass along a lead to a job you’re not interested in or able to take on and any freelance friend worth her salt will return the favor later.

To answer your question, no, I don’t think you have to be a sharer to get by as a freelancer. Not at all. But for the reasons I mention above, it’s to your advantage. Given the isolation so many at-home workers report, I’d think you’d want to cultivate as many mutually beneficial freelance friendships as possible. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself asking your cat for professional advice, which isn’t very useful.

This isn’t to say that all freelancers play fair in the world of share-and-share alike. I’ve met those solo workers who are all too happy to try to steal your gigs right out from under you or who exhibit a lack of gratitude upon receiving a referral so offensive that you vow to never lend them a hand again. Fortunately, these bottom-feeding opportunists are easy to spot. They’re all take and no give.

Mir: What did you learn, between writing My So-Called Freelance Life and your earlier book, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, that you wished you’d known when writing the first one?

Michelle: Everything takes longer to write than you think it will. You’ll write three different introductions to one chapter before settling on one you like. You’ll write entire sections, sometimes even entire chapters, that you’ll wind up cutting from the book. No matter how hard you try, you’ll always over-research. In fact, if you really want to get your arms around a topic, you need to over-research.

Also, you can tell yourself you’ll write 1,000-2,000 words a day, and you will, without trouble, on many days. But you need at least one day off a week, preferably two, to stave off the burnout. And you need a two-week hiatus from the project midway because once you reach the midpoint, you’ll have grown to hate your book so much that you’ll start to contemplate flipping burgers for the rest of your life, anything to not have to face your blasted book again.

Finally, part of my process is to noodle around with the book’s outline and line up research and interviews for a couple of months, before I can bring myself to dive into the actual writing. Rather than beat myself up for nibbling around the edges of the project those first few weeks, I’ve come to accept that this is my way of wading in.

Mir: While it’s not an unbelievably tight productive cycle, it’s still a pretty, shall we say, compact period of time in which to produce a second book on the same topic. Did that make it harder or easier?

Michelle: Part of why My So-Called Freelance Life is out right on the heels of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide is due to the crazy-quick production cycle of my publisher, Seal Press. While many publishers have a nine-month or longer production cycle (i.e., you turn in the manuscript and it hits bookstores nine months later), Seal’s is six months or less. The Anti 9-to-5 Guide came out in Feb. 2007; 20 months later my new book is out. When I sat down with Brooke Warner, my editor, to talk about when we should publish My So-Called Freelance Life, we decided that publishing this fall would be better than publishing six or nine more months from now, in spring. Building on the momentum of the first book seemed like a good idea, especially since so many people were interested in the freelancing aspect of the first book and the questions kept pouring in.

Writing book #2 in such close proximity to book #1 was both harder and easier. It was harder because I kind of needed a break from all things book publishing after the first one and didn’t really have much of a chance to take one. I also had a tighter deadline for book #2 than I did for book #1, and while writing book #2, all these great article writing opportunities came my way, which I of course jumped on, madwoman that I am. That said, book #2 didn’t require as much research as book #1, which made it easier to do. It was also helpful that I was so entrenched in giving advice on the topic already. That made it easier to just plow right ahead with book #2.

Isn’t she great? Tune in Thursday for the second part of my talk with Michelle, where we tackle a writer’s online presence and the perpetual conundrum of work-life balance for freelancers.