In the dead of Chicago’s punishing winters, I am reminded of the many occupational hazards of being a freelancer. In no particular order:

10. Yolander Prinzel nailed it with her post about the freelance life, As A Freelance Writer, I Notice My Ass Often Hurts. Too true!

9. If you write for too long while stretched out on the couch, you can forget where you are, stand up too quickly and entangle your feet on the laptop’s power cable. If you have children nearby, they will learn new vocabulary. That’s one reason why I’ll never have kids. The self-censor feature is absent from my brain.

8. Scotch just doesn’t taste as good at 9AM as it does at 6PM.

7. Everybody calls you at 11AM to ask “What are you doing?”. Well, gee. What are YOU doing? I’m earning a living over here.

6. Working from home means instant access to all that ice cream. You know how it goes. You buy it on Tuesday, it’s gone by Saturday.

5. More brain cells die every time I forget to turn off the news and Maury Povitch comes on the television. The damage continues until I can stop writing and editing long enough to turn it off. Daytime television is like radiation. You should only be exposed to so much, otherwise you develop horrible diseases.

4. The major dilemma each and every day I work is the same: Sushi or Pizza?

3.  1099s don’t come early enough in the mail to let you know you should have spent more money on your home office this year. Are my write-offs enough this time? Maybe not this year. Ooops.

2. Eating Pizza AND sushi in the same leftover lunch frenzy makes for some, shall we say, unique digestive issues.

1. I always lose track of how much caffeine I’ve consumed. The only real indication I need to cut back is when I discover that I’m shouting. And there’s nobody else around.

1. Maverick

2. Socialist

3. Six-Pack

4. Acorn

5. Debate

6. Radicalism

7. Questionable

8. Terrorist

9. Troopergate

10.  Recession

11. Recession-Proof

12. Any combination of “Joe” and “Plumber”

13. Stump

14. Change

15. Exit Poll

16. Undecided

17. Swing State

18. Recount (thanks to Al Franken)

19. Landslide

20. Mandate

FZ readers, you’ve been warned. Anyone caught using these words in a writing context will be forced to endure every videotaped statement ever made by Sarah Palin that contain any or all of the words above.

What really got my gears turning was the reply by a reader discussing the expectations of people who employ you (freelance writers, take note). For some–myself included–it’s that expectation of an editor or client who assumes instant access to you any time they want.

This can be a dilemma for those of us who are at once serious workaholics, but also want to take time to enjoy life outside of the 15-inch screens that dominate our world.  Just today I caught myself contemplating the purchase of a Palm Treo so that I could stay on Skype while out to lunch and dinner…the better to communicate with those clamoring for my freelance attentions.

At some point, you have to draw the line and say “enough!” and I think that while my intentions are noble, the Palm Treo idea is a bad one, at least for now. Circumstances may dictate otherwise at a later date, but for now I am keeping my worlds seperate. Kudos to John Windsor for a great post, and for reminding me NOT to give in to all my workaholic urges.

“Hello? Hello? I haven’t got a signal. I’ll call you when I get there. I love you. Hello? I’ll see you when I get there. I am wearing white socks. Hello?”

I know I must be imagining this, but it seems that on every trip I take lately, whether to Boston, Springfield Illinois, St. Louis or NYC, there is at least one person in the waiting area or on board who apparently has never used a cell phone before. Is ANYBODY still reacting with surprise that they have faulty reception and dropped calls? The sound of GENIUINE surprise in the person’s voice when they experience call interruption (while using their outdoor voice) causes me great internal injuries as I suppress my laughter.

Equally ridiculous is the fact that at least two people will have truly annoying musical ringers, playing at top volume. Apparently people think the “vibrate” function is somehow hazardous to their health, because they never use it.

One of these days I will make enough from my writing efforts to start hiring private charter jets (ha!) and then I’ll be free of ringtones, clueless cell phone shouters, and rudeness in general. And that will be the day that Satan drives a snow plow to the office. I think this screed is basically the result of having spent too much time on trains today combined with a lack of caffeine. I need a beverage.

A few weeks or months go by, and the idiotic practices I see in our beloved writing industry start irritating me. I begin complaining about stupid queries, brain-dead replies to job offers, idiotic and clueless dorks polluting an industry I depend on to pay my bills. Once I get to the top of fever, I start pushing near-rabid diatribes about the worst parts of being a freelancer.

Then, it happens.

I wind up doing something so heinously stupid that I can hardly stand to call myself a freelancer. I eat a large dose of crow washed down with a pint of humility. I think this happens a lot in our business, as my writing partner and fellow FZ editor Catherine Tully has also experienced this sort of phenomena. Once in the early days of our career she had just finished giving me a lecture about proofreading copy before firing it off in a query when she sent off one of her own which read “Dear Blank”.

We had a good laugh about that one, I can tell you. Never drink and query.

I’ve decided to start calling these foul-ups “Dunder-Mifflins” in honor of that painful-to-watch and quite funny show, The Office. My most recent Dunder-Mifflin involved firing off a query to an editor which was quite well received, but a day late and a dollar short. Somebody had beaten me to the punch on a great idea, and I while I felt like a doink for not catching that it had already been covered (6 months prior, so I have SOME excuse, at least in my own mind) I knew the idea was ripe for some OTHER magazine.

I had written a damn fine query, so I cut and pasted the details into a new e-mail and fired it off to another publication. Only problem was, I forgot to remove a bit of personal correspondence which specifically referenced a different article in the publication.

This is a screw-up of the highest order, a rank amateur type of mistake for which I should be repeatedly beaten.

It’s the sort of thing that happens to ALL of us, but that is no consolation. I rail against unprofessional behavior and stupid errors quite publicly, but when I turn my back on myself for five seconds, I am off making the same bonehead plays as everybody else. Feet of clay? Hell, the whole damn thing is made out of clay, thanks very much. Except for my brain, which is clearly a mass of solid bone.

That’s why it always pays to check and double check before you hit send. It also helps to remind yourself that it WILL happen to you. So far I haven’t gotten a reject from the other mag, but I suspect I’ll be caught out as the hasty e-mailer that I was at that moment. With a little luck I might get the gig anyway, but if I do it will be purely in spite of myself.

What a doink. I should apply to be editor of the Dunder Mifflin corporate newsletter. Now there’s a place I might actually be able to fit into. With my brains and skill, I could become secret assistant to the manager in two years.

5. Snarg.net. There is no way to describe this website at all. It’s been on the web so long–possibly a decade now–that I take it for granted. This is one of the few pure art sites online. There are no explanations, no real indications on how to properly use or access the info on the page. You have to figure things out for yourself and try to draw relationships between what you see and what you click-if you can. Sometimes crude, often baffling, always intriguing. A true zen puzzle.

4. Charles and Marie is chock full of a lot of great stuff including my favorite, the On/Off Mug. If I had more cash, Charles and Marie would get a decent chunk of it. I manage to lose time searching through this stuff, and it pays to be a savvy shopper here–they often deal with unique small businesses that run out of their popular products before they can make more!

3.  Phaidon publishes art books, photo collections, monographs, and much more. Phaidon is a sort of holy grail publishing house in both senses of the word. If I buy a Phaidon I know I’ve gotten something truly special, and I would give my right arm to get five minutes of a Phaidon editor’s time with my own portfolio. If you love art, architecture, travel photography or anything else in the visual arts category, you know Phaidon. I like to browse their extensive catalog, online window shopping for the art lover who never has enough coffee table for the coffee table books.

2. Pampelmoose.com. I’ve ranted about Dave Allen’s blog in this space before, but it bears repeating. Music industry news, commentary and criticism, plus a bit of the old snark thrown in for good measure in just the right amount. I get my music fix here on several levels and have found plenty of new sounds to please these jaded old ears. If it weren’t for quality music blogs like this, I’d probably share the sentiments of an editor of Slash Magazine interviewed back in the late 70s in the Penelope Spheeris epic, Decline of Western Civilization; “I think I’ve been through one too many youth movements.” Thanks, Dave, for insisting there will always be great stuff recorded and performed somewhere.

1. Neil Gaiman’s Journal. I have only read a single Neil Gaiman title–American Gods.  But DAMN, what a read! Great stuff, and the journal is fun to read because he’s on the other end of the writing game. Fiction has always tempted me, but it’s tough to make it pay unless you’ve got time to develop a following like Gaiman has, or Chuck Palahniuk’s or even Irvine Welsh. All great writers and all talented multi-taskers. Me, I don’t have the time to spare at present, or I’d be scribbling a bunch of twisted tales. Ahh, pragmatism. Still, I can live vicariously through Gaiman, thanks very much! Highly recommended.

That’s not all, but that will certainly tie you up for quite some time. Good luck getting back to work after this, folks.

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