There’s a lot to find out about being freelance, not least how to find work. While I, ahem, work on that, here are a few other discoveries:
- If you need somewhere to work, you could join the London Library, which Simon Schama wrote about beautifully in the FT recently (link below) or you could save your cash and hang out at the National Theatre. The wifi is really good. And there are many places to sit, so no need to buy a wig to avoid being recognised when you realise you’ve come every day this week.
- You don’t even need to keep buying coffees and cakes; everyone else using it as their rent-free office brings their own. And did I mention the wifi?
- That said, you can justify spending a tenner on edible sundries when you’ve saved the same amount on a seat somewhere else. And the cafe doesn’t blast out irritating music like hip coffee shops.
- There’s not much that a daytime yoga class can’t fix, although the poses might still make you feel like crying.
- If you’ve been made redundant from a newspaper, it might be useful to be able to spend your “re-training” grant on therapy instead to cope with all your likely-to-be-rejected pitches. That’s assuming you still like your career enough to plough on as a writer.
- But finding out you can’t claim for clothes as a work expense might make you reconsider switching career.
- Seeing someone “like” one of your (many) random Tweets will, briefly, feel like some sort of social interaction, even if you don’t know them, or they’re just a bot.
- You can tell yourself that going to an exhibition won’t count as slacking off because it just might spark an idea. It will, however, be mentally exhausting wandering around waiting for said spark.
- You’ll be hunting so hard for ideas that you will dream in sub-standard newspaper prose, or wake up convinced you’ve had a great idea to pitch. You won’t have.
- You might think you’ve had a good day and some useful meetings, but then you’ll remember nobody paid you for it.
- An entire working day can pass and all you’ve done is refresh your emails looking for the replies that don’t come.
- Losing your job feels a bit like a bereavement, which it sort of is, so it’s okay to mourn.
- If you’ve had a baby at any point in the last eight years, you’ll find just sitting somewhere ON YOUR OWN rewarding in its own non-financial way.
- That said, you will feel guilty remembering you’re paying your nanny vast sums so that you can sit here on your own writing this.
- But you will find surprising solace in being your own commissioning editor and publisher.
(That Simon Schama piece on the London Library: https://next.ft.com/content/cc66202c-0d54-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515)
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