Money, money, money (this again?)
Categories: Head hitting brick wall, Like talking but with more typing, Now I'm free(lancing), Things you should be reading
In the midst of the “most wonderful time of the year,” when we should all be trimming trees or menorahs (hey, I know people don’t trim menorahs) (nor do I believe everyone is Judeo-Christian) (just go with me here, okay?), another community uproar has broken out over freelance writers and payment.
Specifically, there’s been a lot of discussion generated by the announcement of REDBOOK’s new “Motherboard,” a panel of bloggers who will be writing for them free of charge.
There’s been so much chatter about this already, I’m not going to subject you to my own long-winded commentary on this. Plenty of people have already covered a lot of what I would say, probably with less flailing around than I would likely do. But if you haven’t been following along—or would like to make sure you see several different takes on it—let’s take a look.
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I’m going to tell you right up front that this may be a little ranty. (Rants in my pants!) I’m angry and I’m not going to try to hide that. I’m angry because it aggravates me when people who are supposedly my colleagues do things that sell themselves short, and—by extension—reflect badly on our industry. It upsets me when someone makes a poor choice, sure, but it enrages me when those poor choices start coloring how potential clients might view me. To the people who respond to this stuff with “Why does someone else’s behavior even matter to you?” I say this: It matters to me because it affects the expectations projected onto me. No man is an island, they say, and I’m here to say no freelancer lives in a sanitized bubble. What you do does indeed sometimes affect my livelihood. So you’d better believe it matters to me.
Perhaps the lesson most firmly driven home to me since beginning my life as a business entity is that I am my business and I need to conduct myself accordingly. My behavior and my work are inseparable, in the eyes of the public. That’s the blessing and the curse of being a freelancer, I guess.
Just about everyone has a story about the job where the boss was completely unreasonable, right? For most of us, that story goes with a job we had in high school or college, when we maybe didn’t know how to handle such a thing, but I’m always amazed at the number of grown, competent adults who carry around war stories of the Job With The Nutty Boss. Part of the lure of freelancing, of course, is that you’re essentially your own boss, and you also have the freedom to pick and choose with whom you’d like to work.
We’ve arrived at that magical time of year when I typically sit down to write my annual post about how school is out and the children are making me insane. Except that this year things are a little different, and that’s not the post I need to write; for one thing, this was a particularly difficult school year for all of us (for a variety of reasons), and so the arrival of summer vacation feels like a much-needed exhalation and relief, for a change. And the truth, too, is that with each passing year my children becoming a bit more independent. Sure, we still have “Really, can you not find anything to do? I’m sure I can find something for you…” moments, but at 12 and 10-and-a-half, my days of playing referee and constant monitor are mostly over.
What I am about to tell you is so completely ridiculous it would be totally depressing if it wasn’t, you know, actually funny. Like, not “ha ha” funny but “this is absurd” kind of funny. You know me; I have to find the humor to stave off the freak-outs.
There are many perks to the various jobs I do, including (but not limited to): Getting to work from home, getting to work in my pajamas, sometimes getting to do great things for charity as part of my job, having a fair amount of creative freedom, and sometimes getting free stuff.