saving ink

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m writing an entire blog post on the ancient Chinese game of Mahjong, or at least the digitalized, solitaire version of it. I first played this game as a teenager, probably in middle school or maybe the first year of high school, when a Chinese-American friend taught it to a bunch of us and we would play for hours on her dining room table. Right away it reminded me of Rummikub, which was unknown to most Americans but familiar to me, as I had played it in Germany with my uncle as a little kid.

Nostalgia aside, I had forgotten about Mahjong for over a decade when I found and downloaded a free solitaire version of the game for my laptop. Then I found a free phone version as well, and it quickly became my go-to procrastination tool during longer periods of work. But unlike taking Facebook breaks or catching up on my Reeder feed, Mahjong breaks felt refreshing, not draining, and after a game or two I was actually ready to get back to work.

Anyway, why is any of this important enough to write about (and what does it have to do with writing, for that matter)? By playing Mahjong only during prolonged stretches of work, I managed to condition myself to work longer. By allowing Mahjong to be my only acceptable form of rest, somehow the temptation to procrastinate in other ways was significantly reduced (though not completely eliminated yet, I am only an ADD-prone human).

Playing Mahjong is also an excellent gauge of current brain functioning for me, which is an important thing to be aware of when intoxication and sleep depravation are regular occupational hazards. If I can’t complete a game in a timely manner, if the tiles are starting to blend together, I know it’s either time for sleep or more coffee. It’s a fail-safe; if I can’t put two Chinese characters together, I have no business writing anything.

My point is, over the last year I’ve learned to develop these systems that allow me to work in spite of myself, even at times when I’d much rather be out riding bikes or occupying a bar stool or even watching cheesy TV shows. Mahjong breaks are part of the system. Another trick is listening to the Battlestar Galacta soundtracks while working - something about Bear McCreary’s gorgeous classical battle compositions puts my mind in a place where it needs to create, be productive, fight battles (“Prelude to War”, anyone?), aspire to greater heights, even if it’s just translating magazine copy or writing website articles.

I wish I could say that my job is always exactly what I want to be doing, that work always feels like play, but that’s bullshit. I love my lifestyle, and there are days when I love my work, but more often there are days when it feels like work and no amount of sugarcoating will make it otherwise. Deadlines leave no room for mood swings or deliriousness. So I put these systems in place so I can work through the work until there’s less of it and more of the type of work that I do love. And even then, I have no illusions that that work will always come easily, but if I can manage to ingrain these little mind tricks, even those days won’t be as hard anymore. At least, so I hope.

In the freelance writing biz in the U.S., there are two ways to get paid: by the word and by the hour, with the first being more common in my experience so far. The rates vary from the abysmal (half a cent/word) to the half-decent, but there’s something that has always struck me as wrong about getting paid by the word.

For some reason, in Poland (and probably other parts of Europe) the pay is per character instead. Perhaps that’s a bit more fair, as it’s hard to imagine the word “convoluted” costing the same as the word “the”. But it’s still a system that emphasizes quantity, not quality, which runs counter to every piece of advice seasoned writers have given: cut, cut, cut. Hack off every piece of unnecessary flesh down to the very bones of the thought.

Pay per hour is great for journalism, when the bulk of your time is spent on research or interviews. But if you want to charge for any creative writing, pay per hour is an absurd concept. Do you put the time in the shower when that idea hit you on the invoice? Do games of Words with Friends in between bouts of writing count too? How does one bill for creative procrastination? And once again, quantity of time doesn’t translate to quality of writing.

Granted, there’s quite a quality gap between Tolstoy and SEO copywriting; maybe a quality Mariana Trench is more accurate. But as a firm believer of doing everything to the best of your ability, whether it’s washing dishes or writing a paid blog post, I tend to dislike systems set up to encourage laziness, because despite my current pontificating my natural tendency is towards the easy road, and taking the hard way is, well, harder when the game is rigged against it.

So our systems of compensation are vastly inadequate, but they exist because writers need to eat (and drink) too, and quality alone is too subjective to remunerate. Maybe in the future machines will recognize quality by a mathematical formula and pay in accordance. Though at that point, those machines would probably be doing the writing anyway.

All that aside, I still find myself rubbing my eyes in disbelief at the fact that other people pay me any sum of money for the words that come trickling out of my fingers. What a world.

I can unequivocally say that 2011 was the most formidable and fulfilling year of my adult life. It was my first full year of just freelancing, which means it was the first year that I have been wholly in charge of my financial situation. It was also the first year I have kept a detailed budget since I had my first job at 16. It was the year I paid off my credit cards in full. It was the year I didn’t leave Central Europe all summer, and still had a blast. It was the year I stepped foot on the African continent for the first time (and did it cheap as hell). Most importantly, it was the year I broke even, despite working the least and having the most fun of my adult life.

But forget my words, let’s look at the numbers, because graphs are fun!

Here’s a breakdown of my total expenses for 2011, by category:

Fun fact: I spent 1/3 of my food budget on booze. Yay? The basics such as rent, electricity, and food ate up the biggest chunk of my budget, but paying off those credit cards (i.e. the sins of the past) really took a toll. 2012 goal: keep that number under 5%. Oh, and then there’s that pesky student loan…

Now that we’ve got money out, here’s money in:

As you can see, proofreading and translations paid the bills. Considering my savings took a hit, it’s no surprise I barely earned any interest. Other is generally selling stuff, band money (very rare), photography gigs (even more rare) or gifts from family, while writing only earned me a measly 6% of my income. My goal for 2012: 50% income from writing.

Perhaps the hardest part of freelancing was the month-to-month disparities in income. Feast or famine, as they say:

(Net income + savings - net expenses)

All in all, I scraped by. I earned exactly PLN 188.39 (about $50) more than I spent in 2011, and managed to end up with just under PLN 800 (about $230) more in my savings account than I started 2011 with.

The Important Part

Victory? Technically, yes. Really though, this was just a(n educational) start to the freelance lifestyle, and this year I need to earn a whole lot more, spend a bit less (especially on booze, ouch) to make this thing sustainable. There is some hope, though, because here’s another telling figure:

Pages translated or proofread in 2011: 1085.18
Estimated hours worked* in 2011: 813.89
Hours worked in a normal 9-5, 40hrs/wk job (assuming 50 weeks): 2,000

What this means: while the average joe was slaving away in a lightless office for 2,000 hours of 2011, I spent about half of that actually working, while the rest was spent reading, working on my websites, reading more, playing music, biking, enjoying the summer, going to festivals, traveling, and in general feeling better about life. That also means I can still work a bit more this year, earn a better income, while still having more free time than if I were traditionally employed.

Just to bring it all home, this was me working in November, on a sunny beach in Barcelona, sipping cappuccinos and enjoying the 19 degree t-shirt temperatures:

What this untimely means: the “free” in “freelancing” makes it absolutely worth it.

*This was my best guess, judging that it takes an average of 15-30 minutes for me to proofread one page and 40-60 minutes to translate one page, based on the breakdown of translation and proofreading pages… let’s just say there was some complicated math involved, but my best guess is that I spent between 800-1,100 hours working in 2011, whereas the average person would have spent 2,000.

One thing I hadn’t really noticed since I’ve been freelance is my usually ever-present wanderlust. When I was working regularly, I would constantly dream of travel. Some of my most epic trips took place in the last few years - the Trans-siberian/China/Australia trip, Iceland on my birthday, several Scandinavian adventures. This summer I stayed relatively close to home. I only left Poland for a few days, and only to neighboring countries - the Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine (though that last one was a first and quite an adventure). 

Part of it is because I’ve been watching the excellent Long Way Round and Long Way Down series on the recommendation of a friend. Part of it is that my 29th birthday is approaching, adding some urgency to my goal of stepping on all of the continents except Antarctica by the time I’m 30. Either way, I have two very massive undertakings in the next year - Africa and South America - and I really need to get started on the planning stages.

So this is partly my asking for advice, particularly when it comes to Africa. That’s probably the first trip I’ll take, and the one that requires the most planning and security considerations. Oh, and I have to do all of this dirt cheap, on account of my constant near-poverty, which is probably another reason why I haven’t travelled much since going freelance - though hopefully with another writing gig or two that will change. It would be great to spend time working in Africa to at least pay for the travel there, so that’s something I’ll definitely look into. Oh, and going by boat would be awesome. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all the thought I’ve put into this so far.

Help?

I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, and no matter how I try to rationalize it (I’ve had a lot of work, my parents visited, there was an epic wedding weekend, I had to clean up cat puke) and say I’ve been too busy living to write, I find that excuse leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Imagine me dropping dead and my obit reading, “She was doing so well but then she got too busy to breathe. Poor thing.”

So what’s the problem, exactly? It’s been eight months since I left my old job and turned freelance. I’m slowly getting to the position where I’m getting steady work (though I need to do more marketing and sort out some legal details still). My website is set up, so all that’s left is to do the actual work when I have it, and that takes far fewer hours per week than my old job required of me, especially since I no longer have to spend eight hours in an office whether I have work to do or not. I have more time than I’ve had since my first year of college (the only time I didn’t also have a job), and plenty of ideas for writing projects, not just in this blog. And yet, it seems that every part of my day is increasingly occupied. So what’s the matter with me?

I think I’ve isolated at least part of it: I may have left my old job behind in December, but I took my old habits with me.

When I had to sit in an office all day, I developed coping mechanisms. As I’m a late riser and night worker, I’d spend the first hour or two of each morning just trying to force my brain awake so I could start being productive. This involved visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, downing enough coffee to dispatch a small elephant and generally killing time until I either had to do something time-sensitive or felt like my brain was present enough to start writing an actual article.

When I used to check email at work, it was a matter of keeping my head above water during the daily flood, which meant ignoring a good number of messages, putting many off until the absolute last minute, and dealing with the truly urgent ones - but not immediately, just before it was too late.

These days, I set my own hours. If I feel like working early (say, noonish), I work early. If I feel like getting groceries and working out and making a nice dinner during the day and then working until the wee hours, I do that. I don’t have a set schedule, I have a schedule regulated by necessity and efficiency. I work when I feel I’m most productive. As for email, it’s no longer a flood but a manageable trickle.

And yet, I still won’t answer some messages for days, though they require minimum effort on my part. Worse still, I find myself spending significant parts of my day visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, drinking coffee and energy drinks and generally killing time. Except now it’s my time that I’m wasting, not an employer’s, and I’m the only one losing out.

This week was a bit of an eye-opener, in that all of my precious habits that I had developed during my years of working at the newspaper and continued into my freelance life were forcefully disrupted. My parents visited for the week, and since my apartment is tiny that meant I slept at a friend’s place while they took over my flat. That meant no computers, TV or even wifi before bed or right in the morning. Over the weekend two of my good friends got married, and since it was a proper Polish wedding that meant the festivities started on Thursday and finished Monday morning. Luckily, I didn’t have much work during that time, and none of it was that urgent, so that means I spent less time in front of my computer and more time surrounded by breathing human beings that weekend than I had in years - and I had an amazing time. Sure, it helped that the wedding party was well stocked with enough food and booze to keep a small nation-state going for weeks, and that I was surrounded by old friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, as well as my parents, who I see about once a year, but in the end what matters is that the world kept going even if I wasn’t constantly reading about it, and I didn’t die of boredom even if I didn’t constantly have a screen in front of my face.

Does that mean I’m going to throw out my computers and start crashing Polish weddings? No, I like working just enough to ward off imminent starvation (though, have you ever seen a Polish wedding? Crashing those would keep me fed for life…). But it does mean that I need to reevaluate how I spend my time, so that every minute spent in front of a screen is spent doing something that will either earn me money now or in the future. I need to start creating more and consuming less. I need to unsubscribe from RSS feeds (or just delete Reeder off my Mac and phone), be content with listening to the BBC while making breakfast for my daily news fix, turn off the screens before bed and get enough sleep so I can drink coffee for pleasure, not necessity, and take back my time.

In other words, I need to unsubscribe from my old habits, and embrace new ones. It’s about time.

12:21 am last night. That’s when it came, that moment. It comes more or less weekly, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always when you’re alone. No television, no spouse, no distractions in your headphones. The bed is the best place - that, or the shower. But it’s always when you have just let your guard down, whether scrubbing routinely or just about to drift away.

That moment, when just for a split second, you know you’re not going to make it.

It takes different forms for different people, most more mundane. A housewife knows they’ll run out of money. A father sees his children taken away. A soldier sees the bullet that will sail straight for him. And I see failure and mediocrity, of being not a late bloomer like I always thought, but a non-bloomer.

Just for that moment, you know, know it’s not worth it, that every effort you make is a waste. But then it’s over, and reason takes over, and you see the road ahead with your dreams fulfilled, or at least a damn good effort made towards them. And luckily, this feeling lasts longer.

Freelancing: It’s like being on vacation, but you still get paid.