this woman’s work

Brett goes back to work tomorrow and he will be missed. Things I will miss most:

• His morning pancakes
• The way he brings me a second cup of coffee while I’m sitting at my desk
• Being able to start the morning at my desk undisturbed
• Knowing that he’ll run the kids to the park and/or library and otherwise fill their lives with wholesome activity
• His annoying singing in the morning
• Having him open the window I can’t reach above my desk
• Chatting with him over lunch
• Talking myself through writer’s block will he patiently listens
• Watching him serve dinner with a flourish and more singing
• All the errands he somehow finds time to run

Well, now I’m a little sad.

This has been a difficult year full of growth and struggle. I’ve learned more than I really wanted to know about the inner-workings of my financial fears and we’ve worked through so much as a couple. I’m excited about this next stage because I think it can get us where we want to be faster (mainly, getting Brett home again with a more stable budget — unless he loves his job so much he wants to stay there, too) and I’m also nervous about keeping up this level of work with a more challenging schedule.

The flipside of the challenging schedule is that I’ll be forced to leave work with work instead of carrying it along with me. I think if I drop most of my pro bono efforts that it’ll go a long way to freeing up my time. I also am going to do a lot less in-person networking and more working the network I already have (because I need to think about marketing, which always seems counterintuitive when I’m really busy but eventually the slow times will come back). And having the one car is going to be annoying. (There’s a bus that we think runs near his job but how near and the length of the commute have not been confirmed. We do know that it’ll be a trade-off: Having a car or having Brett home in a timely manner. It’s not economical to drive him myself gas-wise.)

I got most of my business systems worked out so that I can work more effectively and it’s going to be easier now than it was before Brett came home. (I wasn’t juggling nearly as much work then but what I was juggling I was handling badly.) Besides, it’s only seven weeks of Brett being gone days and then it’ll be a lot easier. (I do my best work in the morning and tend to burn out by about 2pm, which is when Brett will be heading out when his schedule changes.)

So we will be back to a 2-income family. I made a full-time salary in my ePreg days but since then my paychecks have been very much of the part-time variety so this will be the first time in quite awhile that our coffer will have the benefit of two folks throwing money at it. We’re thinking six to eight months and then we’ll reassess barring any exciting developments on my end.

I will also have less time to write for myself for the next two months, which makes me sad/frustrated. Thing is, it’s about long-term plans and knowing that it’s a priority for our future does much to ease my grousing.

Sometime I want to write more about how it’s been to change out our traditional gender roles (husband working, wife carrying for kids & home) and how it has and has not impacted our marriage. I will say that it’s been a bigger deal for people around us than for us although it did force us to confront some of our ingrained ideas about how our family works.

I finished most (not all) of my work to-do list but tomorrow is pretty open to get more done. I have a phone interview with a potential client in the afternoon but otherwise nothing scheduled so I want to crank out at least most of a big project (we want it to launch by the end of next week) so I can clear my desk to start research on another big project (also due at the end of next week).

Today is Thursday, which means Abby and Kristen are already off having a gay old time with Lynne and the kids but I’m not with ‘em ‘cuz I had work. Fortunately they took Noah (Madison didn’t mind staying behind since Brett was staying, too) since it’s the big kid who really suffers when we miss out on stuff. Brett and I are waiting for the husbands to get off work and then we’re all car pooling over there for pizza. I hope that I’ve figured out how to relax by then — I think I may just have to have a drink tonight. So there. And I think I’ll leave my cell and iPod at home. (Dare I? Oh rats. Yes. Darnit, I’m taking the night off!)

Brett asked me today what my dream job was and I said writing stuff I want to write (in a cabin in the woods and one of those fancy but not too fancy cabins, too, more like a Usonian house than Laura Ingalls) but if he means my dream job in light of a need to make money, I’d still say this is pretty close. It’s not like I spend all — or some weeks even most — of my time writing stuff that gets me all hot and bothered but it’s still writing or strategizing and talking to people who are passionate about what they want to do, all of which I like. Someday I hope to spend lots of time alone (with my family — they can come, too) in the green quiet writing essays but meanwhile this will do. Especially if there are friends with pizza and hard cider at the end of it.

Just temporarily, mind you. My old mouse was busted so Brett got me a new one and I did the whole switch-out before I realized that the new one needs to charage. I use my laptop as a monitor though so I have a mouse — just not a convenient one. Basically my entry title is a big lie. Nevermind.

So yesterday my presentation went (I think) well! At least I had fun and people laughed and afterwards some people stood around to ask some advice and some emailed me to say thanks. Mostly it was FUN even though I sweating bullets up there, lemme tell you. There are some things I would do/say differently next time but this is the first time I’ve given a talk like this and not one that was writing-specific. I’m thinking of maybe putting together a longer workshop where there’d be assignments and stuff.

I’ve been having some career remorse lately because I was wishing that I had gone for that MSW or PsyD or something that would let me work with people and get paid. Although who am I kidding? It’d be awfully hard to make enough as an MSW to pay off my MSW loans.

My friend Alicia, who put together yesterday’s workshop, said that maybe I should be a coach but those coaches — some of them are downright cheesy and when I see a coach-type I always think they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m judgmental like that.

I’m at a career impasse as far as my money-making career goes. But I think it’s that I’m struggling with a particular problem and I need to just trudge my way through it. (I’ve got some things set up re., trudging but haven’t had the meetings they require yet.) Sorry to be so vague — suffice to say that at every new level of this here full-time freelance gig, I have to revisit said full-time freelance gig. I never really want to give it all up but sometimes I wander around complaining that I do. You really can’t believe me when I do that and you need to hear the cry for help (and chocolate) beneath the whining. You can imagine how fun it is to be married to me.

Anyway! Today is Thursday but for me it’s not quite Thursday because I have work to do and can’t go play with friends. So I’m sending my stand-in (Brett) and then meeting up with everyone afterwards. I’m a little jealous of my stand-in but he deserves joy, too, I suppose. (sigh)

I get to go into work late today because they don’t have my desk set up yet. That gives me a cushion here on my first official day as a fake office worker. Brett is envious. He has cubicle envy! No seriously. He found work much less stressful than being home with two kids and being responsible for laundry, cooking, cleaning, homeschooling, playdating etc. He decided to get a part-time job both to better secure our base-pay and to get the heck out of the house once in awhile.

We are very different people. Personally I like not having a reason to put on undereye concealer every morning. Maybe if he had to put on undereye concealer he’d feel differently about this whole thing but I doubt it.

This past year of full-time freelancing has been a terrific — if difficult — learning experience. I can see a lot of the mistakes we made but also see how far we’ve come. I’m not where I wanted to be by now but I’m where I hoped to be. (Except for the missing checks.) I have about a billion times the confidence I had when I started out and so even though I’m more aware of the pitfalls I also have more faith in my ability to get ahead of them.

The things that I wanted out of this — control over my own time, the chance to be a part of my family’s everyday life — are so worth the hard parts. But the hard parts are really really hard. (Namely the way that some clients see your invoice duedate as a suggestion they can toss aside for months.) I wouldn’t suggest taking this on without more of a safety net than we had to start. We burned through our available savings pretty fast, thus the disaster this month when we’re staring at checks that are weeks overdue. But the nice thing about taking responsibility (even as we shake our fists at the check-writing gods) is that it means that next time we’ll do better.

I come to the table with money issues in spades and this past month has brought them up all dark and scary with dripping fangs. It’s been terrifying. But it’s also been the chance to know that I refuse to live like this; I won’t let it get this bad again. I can work harder than I thought I could and I can work even when I’m so tear-swollen that I can’t see the computer screen. Added bonus: Once we got past the fear-induced finger pointing Brett and I got back on the same team and are now able to crack doomsday jokes. Feeling like we’re in this together (and isn’t the big reason we wanted a family business is to be a family?) has helped get through the worst of it.

Still, I’d like that check to come.

We told Noah that he’ll know its arrived when he wakes up and Daddy’s bought donuts. Krispy Kreme to be exact. Today it was oatmeal (Madison calls it porridge) but we’ve got donuts in our future. Hopefully not too far off. But for today it’s porridge and cubicles and Daddy working the phone trees at our creditors to stave off the wolf at the door.

It’s been a hard month. The trip to Portland was in many ways lousy and stressful, not to mention a whole helluva lot of money, with gleaming beacons of light (Susan among them) that almost but not quite made it worth it. Then the very large and very late — because it’s still not here — check earmarked for our entire budget for the month, throwing us completely off our budget. (It was meant to subsidize the ten days I wasn’t working and tide us over to the next pay-out.) Oh the money woes! Oh the financial strain!

So I dug in my heels and started making calls and sending out emails and now things are trickling in. I have three meetings scheduled this week and follow-up calls to make next week and an on-site job next week and another call just came in about something that maybe will turn into something else. Plus some encouraging news in other far-flung places, which all adds up to a summer that’s not looking quite so miserable as it was before. (Brett may still try to pick up some work though depending on how next week’s on-site job pans out because we need to rebuild our cushion.

But to serendipity. It’s interesting how the more you look around for work, the more work you find. And the more effort you make in connecting the more interesting connections you make. I keep getting payback from things I did months and months ago without much expectation and this is very encouraging since sometimes I wonder why I’m making these efforts. I tell you: the world is a small pond and things ripple in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Today I met with a woman I saw speak a couple of weeks ago. She has a great story and I knew I wanted to try to pitch her. So we hooked up and before she arrived I met another woman who happens to be an adoptive mother and who started talking to me after she saw me putting OpenAdoptionSupport.com cards out on the community table at the coffee shop. She knows some resources around town I hadn’t heard about (because she’s an international adopter) and I was interested to hear about them. (Also, Julia? She used to work for the local kidney foundation so we gossiped about kidneys a little bit.) Then I met the woman I was there to meet and we played six degrees until we figured out how we know each other. After two hours I have a pretty good handle on the pitch I want to make and a few markets in mind. I also have some ideas about how she can promote the good work she’s doing and that’s exciting, too.

Now I’m blogging right before I leave to take Madison to tumbling but the world seems like a great big wonderful place of possibility and interesting stories right now and this is the best way to feel when you’re still staring down a budget deficit and wondering when that big check is going to show up.

People, hang in there when the going gets tough. Keep working. It’ll pay off if you just keep showing up. (I say this to myself because I need to hear it, too.)

Get this. I’m supposed to deliver this talk in June for the Greater Columbus Arts Council:

Becoming a Working Artist: What it Takes to Make a Living (Workshop)
June 25, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
GCAC Large Conference Room, 100 East Broad Street, Ste. 2250
Writer Dawn Friedman will talk about her switch from part-time writer to full-time freelancer and family breadwinner.  She will discuss the challenges of balancing artistic and financial needs and share the way she learned to market her job skills through marketing her creative self.  Space is limited to 25 attendees, so pre-registration is required by June 13 to attend this informative event.

And of course that came into my email and my addled insecure little brain shouted, “Fraud!” at itself because I was invited to do this during a particularly high point of my life last year and today happens to be a rather low point of my life this year. (That sounds overly dramatic — I mean I’m having a week where I spend a lot of time worrying.)

See, I made sure my work calendar would be clear while I was in Portland (for the most part) and kinda forgot to line up work for the weeks after, which means down the line there the mailbox will be woefully empty of checks. Oops. That reminds me — any of y’all got any writing you need written? Because I’ve got a keyboard right here and I’m not afraid to use it!

As you can see, I’m hustling. And the meetings are revving back up and soon (one hopes) the email box will be filling up with assignments again.

I know one thing I’ll talk about at the workshop is branding because I absolutely absolutely absolutely think that branding is vital to consider in a creative career although it might not seem quite like it on the surface. Branding is such a shallow word for such an important thing, which is that you (I) need to understand how people see you (me). The difference between a working (as in trying to make a living) artist and a corporation is that the corporation is something of a slave to its brand and an artist isn’t but an artist still needs to understand the message her work is sending in order to understand how to get more work.

I mean, this is as simple as saying if you’ve built a reputation as a sculptor and now you’re working in pastels, you have to understand that some folks will have a hard time visualizing your work outside of the sculpture box they’ve set you in and this may play into how they feel about giving you a grant or a show or a commission. It doesn’t mean that once you sculpt you must always sculpt; it means that understanding what you’re up against in other people’s minds will help you get around those barriers.

What I’ve realized recently is that I’ve built a pretty good platform within the adoption community and now I face the danger of limiting myself (i.e., only speaking to the adoption community) and that I need to concentrate on my brand as Writer. Because I’m not an adoption writer — I’m a writer who writes about adoption an awful lot. But I want to have room to write about other things and (importantly because of the message I want to send) I want to write about adoption for more than just an adoption audience.

Is this making sense?

These are two things that I think confuse other writers: branding and marketing. And these are huge things. Once you’ve understood your brand, you have to understand how to market yourself (I am confused by this myself and am working hard to get clear on it, which means sifting through a whole bucket of neuroses. So fun, this artist stuff). Some of it — the marketing — is obvious like knowing which clips to mention in a pitch to this market or that. But some of it is hard like knowing how to hammer down the doors when I have huge emotional roadblocks to pitching. (What is up with that??? I’ve been pitching for, what, 8 years now? And still — the horror!)

Oh and if you want to come to my talk even though I’m outing myself as a person afraid to give it, hit up the good folks at the GCAC. I’ll be awfully glad to have you.

An awful lot of ‘em clash with 2.5 so if you don’t want to upgrade yet, don’t. Give the design people some time to catch up. I went through three or four here before settling on this one (having trouble with widgets in some of them) and this one seems wonky with pictures.

I also redesigned Smart Cookie Communications to leave out some of the sales-y stuff because I’m down on the sales-y stuff right now. I had a blog on there but am too busy to keep it up so I squelched it. Now to a list entry:

1. I know I said I’d post the results of the survey YESTERDAY but I want to try to figure out a helpful way to share the information and haven’t come up with it yet.
2. Brett got a part-time job today. We want a predictable amount of money coming in to ease our budget and decided this is the way to go. The biggest challenge will be working around our one-car status and also if he works nights, that cuts back on my networking at night. But that’s why God created relatives (i.e., free babysitters). And it gives me an excuse to cut back on networking. Heh. (Plus his hours will be flexible.)
3. Being in Portland reminded me of how active we used to be. The day before I went into labor with Noah I walked three miles to go see a movie and visit Trader Joe’s. (1.5 miles each way.) We lived on the third floor, too, and I thought nothing of it. No wonder I put on weight very quickly when we moved back! It inspired me to get my exercise regime back on track. And to work on using our car less.
4. My sister and I spent this morning chatting on the phone and debunking family myths. This is probably the most useful thing about having siblings; Brett and his brother did the same thing during our visit. My sister is a big-hearted person and the family myths hit her harder than they seem to have hit me. I don’t know why it is — she worries more and feels more responsible than I do and this makes her a lovely relative to have but is an awful lot of pain for her. Maybe it’s a birth order thing. (Brett — also the oldest — feels the same way about a lot of it.)
5. I also want to find time to write about other people’s marriages/partnerships because I find them fascinating. Don’t you? Isn’t it weird how people end up together and stay (or don’t) together?
6. Madison is at a mommy (or in this case, daddy and big brother) & me gym class today. It’s free so heck, we signed her up. She would only go if Noah came, too, and he was game so off they went. She’s wearing a pink undershirt that she calls a ballet shirt because it’s sleeveless and a brown and yellow striped skort that she got from Karoline. She looks cute and mis-matchy. I hope she has a good time.
7. Tonight my friends Kristen and Abby are taking me out for helping them with their blogs! I’m going to order the most expensive thing on the menu because they’ve been a lot of work! (Especially that Kristen!) I kid. I don’t even like the most expensive thing on the menu. On principle, I can’t. I’m like that. You guys know how I am about money. It’s sad.