Of freelances and holidays

The trouble with freelancing is working out when to have holidays. It’s not the same as when you’re self-employed. There are so many caveats, most of them of the paranoid rather than the actual kind.

  1. There’s the whole idea of not doing any work. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So if you take a week off, that’s five days at your normal day rate (£650) you won’t be earning. Basically, whatever you’re paying for your holiday, freelances pay double. Of course, you factor that into your rates, but you see the start of the terrible thought processes?
  2. What will happen with your regular clients while you’re away? If you’re employed, someone at work will cover you, or they’ll hire in cover (maybe even a freelance). If you’re not around and you’re freelance, maybe they will find someone to cover you during your absence – maybe someone they like better and they’ll use instead of you in future. So now you have to time your holidays as much as possible around regular commissioning editors, just in case, except print days are just so spread around the month, trying to find a week – or even a few days – that don’t conflict with someone’s urgent delivery date is almost impossible
  3. What about new clients? Who’ll be answering the sales queries when you’re sunning yourself on the beach? You’ll get back only to find they’ve gone somewhere else because you weren’t available.
  4. Slippage. I was supposed to be on holiday yesterday, but I got summer lurgy on Monday, couldn’t finish a feature and had to spend yesterday writing it instead. Do I take another day off or just accept that as a day off I couldn’t take? Soon, you find all your days off have disappeared as you fit in just one last article that they begged you to take.
  5. There’s the problem of what you’ll be doing when you get back. If you don’t set up any work for your return, all those holiday days will be days when you’ve not been pitching. That means the first few days after the holiday will be days without work while you start pitching again. Which means less money again.

I’m supposed to be having a couple of days off right now. I need it after working a fortnight of double shifts at the end of last month (subbing by day, writing by night). Instead, I’ve spent the morning blogging and pitching. I still have to return a prospective new client’s phone call from yesterday. And then there’s all those low-priority emails I have to answer.

I’m going to die an early death of a stress disorder, I know it.