Tomorrow is Independence Day here in the USA, and most everyone around me—if you believe the television and radio—is getting ready to kick back at a barbecue with some frosty drinks. Independence in this country is heavily about charred meats and the right to imbibe alcohol. Oh, and there’s also the Blowing Stuff Up aspect, I guess.

Me, I’ve had a rough few months. My family is having a difficult year. For a while there, I didn’t know if I was even going to be able to continue working, as flexible as my freelancer’s schedule supposedly is. The idea of simply taking tomorrow off to hang out with my family feels crazy in the wake of recent life. It definitely feels like I should take the day to buckle down and catch up on work. After all, most folks will be taking the day off, so maybe I’ll finally catch up!

I’m not going to do that, though. Part of what I’ve lost over the last few months is any semblance of balance in my life. Work has suffered, yes, but so has everything else. I’ve become someone who merely reacts, rather than acts. My life feels like a series of crises, and I’m just here with a fire hose turning towards the nearest fire, then the next nearest, etc.

In honor of the holiday (not to mention because I just can’t take it anymore), that all ends this week.
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One of the questions I get asked a lot is about diversifying—how, as a freelancer writer, can you fill your days and your workload with enough different kinds of gigs to make sure that a downturn in one area doesn’t wipe out your entire client base?

Part of this is achieved through my favorite balancing act, fun vs. profit. There are jobs that don’t pay particularly well but I really enjoy, and then there are jobs that pay gobs of money but are boring. (Most jobs fall somewhere in the middle, but I confess to always having a few gigs out on the edges, there.) Balance is the key, obviously. And of course I thought I was extra-brilliant when I started my bargain shopping website because it’s a subject about which I’m passionate, but represented my entry into a new earning model: Affiliate revenue.

Most of the links to items I post on Want Not are affiliate links, meaning that they are tracked and I get a commission on purchases made through them. Voila, instant revenue stream! Of course, as online shopping has increased in popularity, so has the government’s desire to make sure they get their cut. And that’s how affiliate tax nexus laws began.
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I am practically the neurotic poster child for being ready for anything when it comes to freelancing. I’ve been writing here for years about all of the things you need to take into consideration before going into business for yourself—everything from handling your taxes to having redundant computer backups to making sure your work is diversified enough that one client or one particular area of expertise can’t take your business down if there’s an economic downturn.

I dropped out of Girl Scouts, but that doesn’t mean I ever stopped loving Being Prepared. The truth is that I am given to anxiety, and knowing what to expect—or that you’re in a position to weather even the unexpected—is the best offense against that anxiety.

And it’s true that I have come through several disaster-level (smallish, but still) setbacks as I’ve plodded down this path, learning as I go. I’ve had the catastrophic hard drive failure without appropriate backups in place. I’ve had the IRS slap my knuckles before I turned over my finances to an accountant. I kept going even when layoffs were happening all around me (and sometimes even to me).

Today I want to tell you about two things emergency-prep things; one, I did just right. The other, I got all wrong.
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I’ve written before about the challenges that face any freelancer who attempts to take a vacation; unlike those who work salaried jobs, freelancers can (theoretically) take vacation whenever they want. The problem, of course, is that salaried positions limit vacation time, but then you are (usually) not expected to do any work while exercising said vacation days. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, and if I have my computer, I can work.

The problem is that it’s very hard not to do that. It’s very rare for me to stop working entirely even while “on vacation,” and most of my fellow freelancers suffer from the same malady. All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, but if Jack was a freelancer writer I suspect all work and no play would make Jack a burned out, bitter person. Just a guess.

I’ve taken several different approaches to various vacations over the years, from killing myself for up to a month beforehand to get work done ahead of time (stressful!) to just telling clients I will be unavailable and giving up income for some time period (also stressful!). This time, I’m winging it.
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Because I know you care deeply (ha!) I thought I should come back with an update after the post I wrote about considering going gray. I was, and still am, kind of amazed at the strong opinions people have about whether or not hair color matters.

As you can see from the picture here, I decided to just go ahead and take the plunge; I not only stopped coloring my hair, I decided to remove myself from the two-tone purgatory I’d been living in for the past six months and let my stylist just… cut it all off. I honestly think the cut was way more traumatizing than seeing exactly how gray I’ve become (hint: very), if only because it was such a radical change. I know that in my header picture on this blog my hair is pretty short, but when I went for my cut, my hair was easily down to my bra strap. Long.

The cut itself was like the clown car of hair events. First we discussed what was going to happen, and my stylist had me put my hair into a low ponytail. Then she picked up her scissors and sawed off the ponytail (which was a good 10″-12″ of hair, right there). I figured that would be the worst of it, you know? But then she started cutting. First she shaped the new style, and there was quite a lot of hair falling, but I expected that. But then she started layering/thinning/texturizing and it was surreal. I mean, I was watching in the mirror, and I could see that my hair was already very short… and yet, huge tumbleweeds of hair continued falling to the floor. By the time it was done, it really looked as though several poodles had been skinned in the general vicinity.
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For one of my gigs, I have the freedom to write about pretty much whatever I like (relative to self image and/or my experience of being female), and last week I wrote about my hair. Specifically, I wrote about how I feel like I’m losing the battle against my advancing gray. For me, this was an off-the-cuff musing, resulting mostly from a couple of weeks of extreme stress and very little free time, and realizing that right now my hair looks just plain awful. Three inches of obvious roots isn’t attractive on anyone. Luckily, my hair is very curly—which hides it, somewhat—but still. It’s not a good look. The question was whether I make peace with going gray, and stop coloring (and likely cut my hair short, at least to start), or continue to color even though I sort of hate it, because I’m still relatively young and gray hair on women who aren’t senior citizens is, I think, often viewed as lazy or unprofessional.

What shocked me, though, was that (at last count) there were nearly 90 comments, and while some of them were of the “do whatever feels right to you” variety, many more were vociferous defenses of one camp or the other. “Embrace it!” urged several commenters, while my own father (the source of my early gray!) suggested that I do the extra work for now because I’m too young to go gray. One anonymous commenter not only went all-caps to make their point (”DO NOT GO GRAY”), the justification was that my wonderful husband doesn’t want me to look “OLD.” (The hell?)
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Whenever someone wants to talk to me about my career as a writer, they invariably want to know how I got started, what my plan was, and/or if I “always knew” I wanted to write.

I seem to end up answering these questions in bits and pieces. Have I “always” been a writer? Sure, if you count journaling, rambling letters and/or emails, and the fact that I’ve always enjoyed putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). It’s something I’ve always done in one form or another. But did I always plan to be a writer? Of course not. That’s not a practical career goal, you know. No, when I went to college, I planned to be an actress.

Stop laughing.

It’s true. Right up until my senior year, my plan was to get my degree in theater and then move to New York City and go on cattle calls until I hit it big and lived happily ever after. Or something. Only, I discovered that I had no desire to live in New York City (or any other giant city), and also that I probably didn’t have the patience and perseverance to try to “make it in the biz” when I’d already spent years being told by my theater professors that I wasn’t pretty enough to get good roles, anyway. (This is true—both that I was told that, and that it was the truth.)
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I love my accountant. You know this about me, because I say it all the time. I’m saying it again. Because I love him that much.

When I am not busy proclaiming my undying (yet completely businesslike and platonic, I assure you) love for my accountant, I’m probably saying this: Worth every penny. Because he is.

Everyone who freelances has a Starting Out period where every penny is precious. How long that time lasts varies, of course, and I went through it, too, so I totally get that there’s this start-up time when you’re not even making enough money to cover your expenses, not really, and hiring an accountant seems Completely Out Of The Question. That’s fine. What I do say, though, is that as soon as you can afford it, hire an accountant.

When can you afford it? That’s up to you. I would say that if you’ve reached the point of incorporating—or maybe even just thinking about it—it’s time. And yet, there’s always someone who will argue with me that they’re perfectly capable of handling their taxes and other paperwork themselves. My standard answer is that I’m sure they are, but I think they should hire an accountant anyway.
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I feel like I’ve been writing about how stressed out I am for at least a month, now. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas—and all of the family time therein, or worrying about missing that family time—always seems so crammed full of obligations that I’m often left with precious little time to just enjoy, which I think is kind of a shame.

And as much time as I spend trying to figure out how to take time off, get away from my desk for an entire day (imagine!), the deeper issue is that day-to-day balance so that life feels like something to be experienced rather than an endless slog. (Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but still.)

It’s not about figuring out a vacation, necessarily, but about making every work day more doable, more manageable. I mean, vacations are nice and all, but until I hit the lottery (which is difficult, I’m told, if you never actually buy a ticket), I still have to work for a living… so I’d rather figure out how to make most of my time more enjoyable than simply endure for long stretches between the nicer bits.
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‘Tis the season for my otherwise relatively peaceful slumber to be interrupted in one of three ways:
1) I can’t sleep. I toss and turn, thinking about all of the things I need to be doing.
2) I don’t go to sleep when I should, because I have too much work to do.
or
3) I fall asleep, and dream that I’m working. I wake up tired and grumpy.

The most wonderful time of the year? Uh, maybe for someone else. For me, pretty much the entire window from Thanksgiving to New Year’s is when I wish I did anything other than freelance. It’s a busy time for me, anyway, but the lack of vacation when my cube-farm friends are kicking back for a week or two is hard. And when my kids are off school and I feel like I’m chained to my desk, that’s hard, too.

I know. Wah wah wah.

I chose this life, and 95% of the time, I love it. Nevertheless, Burnout often feels imminent during the month of December, for me. So how do I get through? It’s all in the little things.
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