Wednesday, November 03, 2010

now we're rocking on the dance floor acting naughty

I've been unemployed less than three weeks, and yet I'm already starting to have days like when I used to have the day job. In other words, it's almost one a.m. and I'm working on my couch while watching television (in this case, the election returns, so that's not really a ritual). And, I'm getting paid for what I was working on; the freelance gig that I mentioned yesterday came through, and I spent about five hours on it today, with another call tomorrow to determine what else they want me to focus on. While I'm not exactly a salesperson, I did (mostly by sounding competent) upsell from just a straight editing/writing project to also designing a survey and possibly doing some more editing/content creation for them going forward.

So for all that I hadn't intended to start freelancing yet, this thing that I fell into was quite fortuitous and is making me think harder about setting up my business sooner rather than later. I'm still not going to push hard on it before the end of the year, since I want to finish my book first, but I should start pulling together a business plan, identifying possible markets to go into (such as website content creation, freelance copyediting for books/dissertations, freelance writing for blogs or magazines, consulting on creation vision/mission statements, etc.) and setting my target rates and income.

sssanyway, even though I worked for five hours on this project, I still managed to rearrange my living room for a furniture delivery (I got another bookcase), vote (fun but depressing), go to the gym (where I spent 50mins on a recumbent bike reading a couple of chapters from the book on blogging for the class that started tonight), grab something to eat, and then go to class from 6:30-9:30pm before coming back to work some more. The class is new -- it's on blogging, and I'm really impressed with it. It's going to force me to get into gear on setting my romance blog's brand and content themes so that I can start blogging there more regularly, and I think the class discussions are going to be v. interesting.

But now, I should probably sleep; I should get up in six or seven hours so that I can be fully awake for the call. Depending on how much I need to turn back around for the client, I also desperately need to write tomorrow, and I have my magazine class tomorrow night -- so sleep is essential. Goodnight!

1 comment:

Will K. said...

Being in AW has taught you well. Use those mighty upselling skillz!