Playing hooky at the beach

It was the kind of day I used to dream of when I worked in a full-time corporate role: a hot summer day when instead of dressing up and heading to the office just as the cool of the morning dissipated into hazy humidity, I instead made sandwiches, packed water bottles, rummaged for sunscreen, and loaded them all into the beach bag.

Playing hooky is a relative term when you’re self-employed. I didn’t have to offer excuses (or fibs) to any manager or supervisor; I just had to convince myself that giving up my usual work hours in favor of getting an early start to the shore wouldn’t result in my missing all my deadlines and losing all my contracts for this week.

Over the past couple of summers, ever since I became a full-fledged self-employed freelance writer, the kids and I have developed a schedule that works for all of us when they’re on vacation. I generally sit down at my desk by nine and work steadily until noon; then we have lunch, and after lunch we do something recreational together. Although that scheme allows for only half the daily work hours that I log during the school year, it seems to work, in part because I have less administrivia related to volunteer work at the kids’ school during the summer, which tends to eat up some of my writing time during the rest of the year, and in part because I don’t really mind having to fill in with another hour or two of work in the evening, since it’s the tradeoff for so much flexibility.

But yesterday I didn’t even turn on my computer in the morning: I just packed up our beach gear and climbed into my friend Leigh’s car, while Tim and Holly greeted Leigh’s two boys and one of their friends and settled in amongst the back seats. If the ninety-degree heat and humidity wasn’t incentive enough to make it a beach day, the fact that someone else was willing to drive – and had enough passenger space for all of us – certainly sealed the deal.

It was a wonderful day to be at the beach: hot and sunny but not particularly crowded. For hours, we swam, walked along the shoreline, and basked in the sun (slathered in sunscreen, of course). After we returned home, I let the kids cool off indoors with some computer and video games while I filed the article I should have worked on that morning.

Having this kind of flexibility is not something I’ll ever take for granted; I love being able to rearrange my work schedule so that I can play hooky once in a while but still meet all my deadlines on time. I truly believe that it’s good to practice this kind of spontaneity once in a while. When I was in elementary school, my mother let my sisters and me each miss one day of school each year for a special excursion: a trip into the city for lunch and some kind of performance, most often. My father did the same during the summer, when the stakes weren’t the same – he didn’t have work and we didn’t have school – but there was still the sense of escape: during our yearly vacations, he would spend one day alone with each of us doing something special like fishing, biking or horseback riding.

My kids didn’t seem particularly impressed that I took a whole day off from work to go to the beach; they respect my work schedule but don’t necessarily see it as particularly important. But I hope in some way, the freedom we observed yesterday made an impact on them. I’m so lucky to be able to do this, and it’s important to take advantage of the opportunity when it arises. Having plenty of work to do is a good thing, far better than being under-employed. But finding ways to step away from it once in a while is uniquely rewarding as well, especially on a perfect beach day like yesterday.

Empathy in interviewing

Much of my workday is spent interviewing people about subjects important to them: projects, initiatives, passions, experiences. After the publication of my memoir last fall, I had a small number of opportunities to be an interview subject rather than an interviewer. The host of a nationally syndicated show on NPR interviewed me for a whole hour, a reporter for a community newspaper in our region came over for coffee to interview me, and one of my colleagues at the Boston Globe even did a short phone interview that she later wrote up into a brief blurb (reasonably enough, the Globe prefers not to give a great deal of coverage to its own writers’ projects).

At the time, I told some of these interviewers that I was tickled to be “on the other side of the counter,” because it was just fun to have people asking questions about me rather than vice versa. (I’ve sometimes imagined a New Yorker cartoon in which Terry Gross is approached at a cocktail party and snaps, “Listen, I’m really not interested in hearing about you! Let’s make it about me for once!”) But as more time goes by, I realize that it was not only fun but also professionally beneficial for me to be interviewed, because it reminded me to be more empathetic of the people I’m interviewing.

Specifically, when I have numerous quotes to gather in a little time, I tend to grow secretly impatient with people who have a lot to say. Though I have enough experience as a journalist to know it really doesn’t help to try to hurry people, I also tend to know before our conversation even begins what it is that I need from them, and it’s tempting to try to race through the discussion to get to the part I’m after.

But then I remember how as I was falling asleep the night before my NPR interview, I was still thinking about what I would say, how to tell my story, the right words for framing certain thoughts.

In short, it was a big deal to me to be interviewed, and I wanted time and space to tell my story clearly. And it helps me to remember that when I call other people for quotes, I myself may know that they are just one of a half-dozen people I need to talk to on the same topic, and all I really need is a sentence or two – but to them, it’s a big deal to be asked to share their thoughts, and they too probably thought long and hard about just what they want to say.

The bottom line is that no matter whether the end result is an article or some entirely different product, empathy almost never hurts, and being an interview subject, even just for a very short phase in my life, helped me to see that. It’s good for me to remember that I’m asking people about issues that are important to them, and they want to be heard.

So now I try to slow down. Even when an interview subject is explaining something to me that I already understand, I let them process it in their own words. Even when they’re straying far from the important part of my question, I let them meander. Every last element of their response may not matter much to me, but it does to them. And the more I can remember that feeling when I had it myself, the more I can ultimately do justice to their perspective. Which is, after all, why I bothered to called them.

Work I just can't pass up

It was late Friday afternoon and my editor at the Globe was calling to tell me that she’d decided the story idea she’d sent me earlier should be a full-length feature rather than just a short clip – and that she was therefore going to reassign it to another writer since I had two other articles on deadline for this weekend.

“No, let me keep it!” I exclaimed before I could give it much thought. “It’s exactly my type of story!”

And it is, too: a profile of a Boston-area writer who travels the country visiting major league ballparks so that he can then write mysteries for grade-school aged readers about the different parks and teams. Much as I lament the fact that I lack the hard-hitting drive of an investigative reporter or the tenacity of a political correspondent, I love the niche I’ve found for myself: features about not-so-famous people doing interesting things. Or, as I once put it after doing a story about the anomalously high number of twins in one grade in Carlisle and another one about kids with food allergies, “I do stories about twins, stories about food allergies, stories about twins with food allergies.” Or, as one friend has occasionally described my career, “Drawing water from a stone.” Of course, that was before I wrote a feature about him and his family that filled out three-quarters of a section cover on a recent Sunday.

But both of the other two stories I needed to work on this past weekend were exactly my type of story too, and my editor was just trying to lessen the burden on me.

Hearing myself protest to keep all three stories, I almost had to laugh. My editor didn’t know that we’d just moved two days earlier: my house was chock full of boxes to be unpacked, plus I had all the usual weekend responsibilities associated with kids and household; the truth is it was a terrible time for me to take on triple my usual workload.

But I just couldn’t say no, because I simply love writing feature stories and can never pass up the opportunity to do so. When I started freelancing for the Globe about six years ago, each assignment I received was a thrill beyond measure. Days I had an article published felt like my birthday, all day.

And that’s changed only slightly. It no longer feels like my birthday when I have a story in print, now that I’ve come to realize how few people actually read every story in the paper on a daily basis, and I no longer want to run around the house screaming with excitement every time an editor assigns me a story. But as witnessed this weekend, even now that I submit a weekly column and do two or three additional features every month, it still delights me beyond reason to have an assignment, two assignments, a whole pile-up of assignments.

I write features for a major city newspaper. What was long ago a dream and then later a novelty is now more like a regular job, or as regular a job as a freelancer can hope to have. But it still thrills me. And that, I have to believe, is just how a career should be.

Workday inertia

Inertia is an amazingly powerful force, I’ve come to realize. Especially on me.

And more so now than ever, it seems. These days, unlike when the kids were really little and I was home with them, or the years following that when I was working in an office full-time, I spend my work days at home, at my kitchen table, writing. For six hours at a time. It’s the solitude and uninterrupted writing time I’ve craved for years, and now that I have it, I don’t care what the assignment is – I can be working on an article for the Globe, or writing about varicose veins for my client who runs a medical website, or studying up on football stats for the next segment I need to draft for my client who is compiling a book about pro football, or revising my own manuscript-in-progress yet again – it doesn’t matter what the topic, I’m grateful just to have the time to write.

Sometimes a little too grateful. I find it very hard to make myself get up and do anything else.

I know that mental stimulation is important during the work day even when I’m on deadline. I just have trouble sometimes overcoming the urge to just stay where I am and keep writing.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine here in town hosted a midmorning gathering. I was in the middle of a writing assignment, and it started to rain hard. “I should go to this get-together, but it’s so tempting to just stay put,” I said to a client who called to discuss an upcoming project. Since Carlisle is almost entirely a driving town rather than a walking town, there’s always the additional excuse that staying home is more environmentally sound than going anywhere.

“Just go. You’ll be glad you made the effort,” she replied.

I was puzzled. The client hardly knows me; she doesn’t know the host of the party or any of the other guests who would be there; and she wasn’t even close enough geographically to see how hard it was raining. Why was she so sure I should go?

But then I thought about the note I’d have to write apologizing if I didn’t show up, and how sheepish I’d feel next time I saw the host. And so I reminded myself it was less than a ten-minute drive to the party; I could stay for 40 minutes and not be away from my desk for more than an hour total.

Needless to say, it was the right decision. The house was full of cheerful, welcoming faces, hot coffee and fragrant baked goods. I caught up with friends I hadn’t seen since before summer vacation. I traded opinions on local issues and heard updates on the construction project at our school that I should have known about from the newspaper but hadn’t taken the time to follow closely.

Best of all, I didn’t have to write a sheepish apology attempting to excuse my absence.

Yesterday it wasn’t a social occasion that pulled me away from my desk but an unexpected offer from my father to drive me thirty minutes to the repair shop where my car was being fixed. I could have just waited until the end of the day and gotten a ride from Rick, as I’d planned to do. As before, the lure of sitting at my computer writing was almost irresistible.

But so was the chance to have a few minutes to visit alone with my father, and doing that particular drive in the midafternoon was a much better idea than waiting for rush hour. And so I shut down my computer and climbed into his car.

We had a great visit. Not for any particular reason – we talked about an issue related to town government, recent segments we’d heard on NPR, nothing weighty – but it was just good to get away from the silence of my workday and spend a little undistracted time with my father. On the way back, having picked up my car and said goodbye to him, I even prolonged the trip with a stop at the supermarket, taking advantage of the midafternoon lull there to enjoy empty aisles and no lines.

It’s good to be able to focus on work. I’m really grateful that my workday affords me such solitude, but I’m also glad that once in a while something compels me to overcome my inertia. Thoreau wrote that he had one chair for solitude, two for company, and three for society. It’s a useful image to keep in mind. The work day shouldn’t be all about that one chair. Even Thoreau, who moved to a cabin in the woods to live deliberately and in relative solitude, knew that once in a while he should really pull out those two other chairs.

Working at writing: It's all about how you spend your time

I’ve been to only a small number of writers’ conferences. Still, this article by writer/editor A. Victoria Mixon about when to be skeptical made me smile, because it reminded me not only of conferences but also of all the adult ed classes on writing that I used to take when I was in my twenties, and, to some extent, what I now sometimes say when people ask me about writers’ groups.

The pitfall that all of these things – conferences, classes, writers’ groups – have in common is that before you spend your time and/or money on them, you have to ask yourself this: Will I get more out of this experience than I’ll gain if I spend the same amount of time at my desk (or favorite armchair or Starbucks table or treehouse) writing?

Because really, that’s what I’ve learned in the twenty years since college, approximately half of which I spent trying to become a published writer and the other half, the ten years since, I’ve spent actually getting work published. Time you spend writing is almost always more valuable than time you spend listening to other people talk about writing, because if my experience is any indicator, writing is really more than anything about practice.

Moreover, there are people whose advice you should listen to when it comes to writing if you want to get published, but they are not friends or instructors; they are editors, and not just any editors but the editor of the publication you are writing for, or trying to write for, or hoping to write for. I’m a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. In my early adulthood, I took a variety of adult ed classes that, since they were offered in Boston and were on the topic of freelance journalism, might as well have been called “How to Write for the Boston Globe.”

Nothing I learned in those five years has been as useful to me as three or four cumulative conversations with one of the many editors at the Globe who has edited one of my stories. They know what they want, and over the years, I’ve learned how to write what they want. That’s not to say it’s the only way to do it, but this is a situation where practical application is so much more valuable than a theoretical approach. I learned how to write for the Globe by, well, writing for the Globe. And I got my foot in the door not by polishing my skills in writing classes but by sitting at my desk coming up with story ideas and eventually finding some that the Globe wanted.

With conferences, the issue is a little different, but my impression has often been that writers who attend conferences squander a lot of time talking about writing when they could be practicing it. The exception for me was the one time I took an admissions-based workshop at a conference. It wasn’t that we were necessarily more talented writers than any twelve members of an open-enrollment conference session; it was just that each of us had to submit a writing sample from a project we had under way in order to be accepted, and the fact that we were working on a specific project meant that the conversation was more targeted than the typical free-for-all discussions at conferences in which participants asking speakers unhelpful questions like “Where do you get your ideas?” (Really, if you have to ask that, you probably shouldn’t even be attending a writers’ conference.)

Writers’ groups are another issue. I belong to one very large group of freelancers, but it’s a networking group, not a critique group. We meet a few times a year for socializing and sometimes to hear a speaker talk about a very specifically targeted topic like writing for the web or writing a screenplay. It’s useful because the information is so specific. I haven’t joined a critique group in many, many years because as valuable as the insights of other writers can be, it’s again a matter of weighing the time you commit to the group against the time you could be writing. In writers’ groups, not only do you spend time at the meetings; you commit to reading other people’s work in between meetings, and the more group members you have, the more time that involves.

Yes, it’s true that over the years I’ve learned from conference presenters, writing colleagues, panelists, authors, and all kinds of other external sources, but ultimately, nothing has taught me as much about writing as sitting at my desk writing has. And nothing has taught me as much about how to get published as talking to an editor who is potentially willing to publish my work.

Writing conferences can be a great diversion, when a diversion is what you need. But for the most part, in my experience, succeeding at writing is about outlining ideas, writing copy, revising drafts. No money, no registration, no applications, no travel. Just sit down and write, and you’re taking the best steps possible for your career as a writer.

Professional development: Acquiring a sense of restraint

My editor emailed me late yesterday afternoon to ask if I had any feature story ideas. As I drove later that evening to a meeting, I thought about different ideas, but kept dismissing them. This may sound like a defeatist attitude, but within the context of my journalistic career, it actually might represent progress.

When I started having features accepted by the Boston Globe, I was sun-dazzled with excitement. Having that byline was so important to me that I forgot being part of a Globe story might not be the highest priority of everyone I involved in my articles. It wasn’t a matter of celebrity; it was just that for me, being a regular freelance contributor to a major city daily was the culmination of a decade of striving for publication. Because in my mind, nothing was more important than writing for the newspaper, I grabbed every assignment I could get.

And then I learned some lessons the hard way. While I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve lost friends over any articles or essays I’ve run in the paper, I’ve definitely had some sobering moments. An article I was elated to be assigned about a controversial Halloween celebration in one neighborhood resulted in one of the residents of the neighborhood calling me to express her displeasure over my use of the phrase “granite countertops.” A story about the high number of twins in our town caused a mother to be upset with me for not letting her younger, non-twin son appear in the photo with his brother and sister. And when I wrote a first-person essay that I thought was lighthearted and entertaining about “divorcing” one book club so that I could join another, it received a frosty response from some, if not all, members of both book clubs.

Sometimes, too, I’m the one who ends up at the sharp end of my own judgment. I was thrilled to have an essay I wrote on my son and his first protective cup (as in underwear worn for baseball) embraced by a Globe editor – until I saw it in print and wondered how many pedophiles were reading my essay about my son’s private parts. But it didn’t teach me a lesson: a year later I wrote an essay about my daughter’s imaginary friends – and had similar qualms when I saw it in print.

Gradually, though, I’m finally developing what I consider a little bit of journalistic maturity. I no longer get so carried away with my own delight in self-expression that I completely overlook the possible reactions of the people I might be writing about. While it’s true that earlier this month I published an essay about being annoyed when my kids’ teachers assigned “family homework,” I made sure to qualify at least three times in the same essay how much I like and respect the entire faculty and administration at my children’s school. Besides, I reasoned, I’ve never known their teachers to read the Boston Globe.

I learned within six hours of that article’s publication that parents were clipping it out at the breakfast table and hand-delivering it to the classrooms, so there went that protective measure. But none of them took offense. Not too much, anyway.

Still, my newfound sense of restraint is probably a generally good thing. Except that yesterday it was preventing me from settling on any good ideas at all. A feature about over-the-top luxuries at our school’s fundraising auction? Sure to alienate some of the parents who spent a lot of money at the auction, and equally sure to elicit fiery responses from opponents of public school fundraising. A story about a teardown controversy in a nearby town? No; it was a town where I had several clients for other freelance assignments, and I didn’t want to make any enemies there either. I thought briefly about a family I know slightly who recently lost a child to heroin overdose and have been working hard to bring attention to the issue of drug use in the affluent suburbs. Sure, I told myself, and have heroin dealers on my case? Maybe not.

It’s not professionally productive for me to grow paranoid. I find story ideas by staying abreast of what’s going on around me, and inevitably, friends and neighbors are involved. And often they appreciate my drawing attention to their causes and projects. But overall, it feels like a new stage of wisdom that I have these second thoughts now. Not at the expense of ever coming up with another story idea. But if I avoid future episodes of being blacklisted by my book club, that’s just fine as an outcome.

Google searches, or why I love being a freelance writer

Almost every day, the work I do reminds me of why I love being a freelance writer, but as I was wrapping up last night, I hit on a tangible representation of what’s so pleasing about my work day. Imagine, I thought to myself, if I kept a list of every term I searched on Google each day?

Of course, the idea occurred to me at 10 PM, so I hadn’t done it for that day, but I tried to re-create my Google search list from memory. It looked like this:

• Homeschooling in Maine
• Pseudomonas bacterium
• Average age of Iraq war veteran
• NFL players religion
• World War II spy doll collector
• Bariatric sleeve surgery
• Littleton school budget FY 2011
• Acupuncture for weight loss
• De-cluttering tips
• Security Tools virus

Okay, I admit that last one wasn’t for an article I was being paid to write: it was because my computer caught a nasty virus and I was trying to figure out how to fix it. But all the rest were for projects I was on deadline to finish. Some of them I wrapped up yesterday; others I’ll finish before the week is over.

When I look over the variety in that list, it makes me feel so privileged that this is how I earn my living. I’ll never be an expert in any of these topics – not a single one of them – and I’m not sure I could give a cogent explanation of pseudomonas bacterium even after spending a half-hour researching it, though I could tell you quite a lot about a microbiologist in Washington state whose postdoctoral research topic and its relationship to cystic fibrosis would eerily come to transform her personal life when her daughter was born with that very condition. And I can’t claim that the article on the Littleton school budget was one of my most fascinating. But it was short and easy to write, and again, I learned something.

My 11-year-old came home from school earlier this week saying he needed to research Colonial taverns. I sat down to help him, but I practically had to physically restrain myself from taking over. Because I simply love research. Never mind that I attracted 17 on-line comments, half of them derogatory, last weekend on boston.com for an essay I wrote on not liking to get involved with the kids’ homework; this was Tim’s first research project, and all of the sudden I saw homework in a new light.

“Mom, it’s my project,” Tim said gently. I made myself give him the desk chair and move across the room, but I was practically salivating. Colonial taverns? I know nothing about that! Hey look – they doubled as inns! They were the place where locals got their national news and debated politics! Strangers were sometimes expected to share overnight accommodations – which appalled European travelers! I could feel my fingertips itching to take notes.

But this was Tim’s project. The others were mine, though, and I got to spend six hours yesterday the way I like best to spend my workdays: immersed in scratching the surface of random topics. Unlike the microbiologist I was profiling for an alumni magazine, I’m no expert in anything (though I fear I might reluctantly become an expert in computer viruses). But I love having the chance to take a quick look at a dozen or more different topics every work day. And that’s why there’s nothing I’d rather be than a freelance writer.

Hard to say when enough is enough

I was talking earlier today with an acquaintance who is a realtor. She told me she was leaving for a weeklong vacation in Florida because she really needed some time to relax. “But of course, if anything happens with any of my listings during the week, I can work from Florida,” she said.

Of course. Although I’ve never before thought about any similarities between being a real estate agent and being a freelance writer, as she said that, I knew exactly what she meant. I’ve been the same way recently: if work comes my way, I’ll do it. Never mind relaxing or visiting Florida. Those of us not in salaried positions don’t turn work opportunities down.

I remember what it felt like to be a salaried employee with paid vacations. Yes, it’s true that we all put in a certain amount of desk time – or phone time or email time – while away from the office, but there was still always that certain smugness, that sense of “I earned this time off. I work my 49 weeks a year so that I get three weeks like this one, when I’m in effect getting paid for not working.” It was a concept that my husband could hardly fathom when we were just out of college and he started his first salaried position shortly before Labor Day weekend. “Look at me – I’m at the beach, but I’m still getting paid!” he crowed on that first-ever paid holiday. “Look at me now: I’m sitting around eating hamburgers, but I’m still getting paid ‘cause it’s Labor Day!” And so on. New to the corporate world after a young adulthood of manual labor and hourly pay, he loved the idea that the meter was running even on a holiday.

I gave up that comfort when I became a freelancer, and like my realtor friend, I’ve been finding it impossible to walk away from any kind of work opportunity lately. The fact is that right now – like as of the past two weeks or so – I have more work than I ever dreamed possible when I contemplated a freelance career. All my clients and publications seem to be coming through for me at once this week: I have assignments here and there and everywhere, far more than I ever imagined I’d have. It’s as if everyone who ever said to me “I might have some work for you in the future” sent me a contract – and a deadline – over the weekend. In some ways I’ve achieved the point in my career that I always hoped to reach: my day is full from start to finish with paid writing assignments.

The problem, not surprisingly, is that the day doesn’t really reach that finish. There’s always a little more I could get done. When I was working for a corporate employer, when the work day ended, it ended. Now it never seems to end. The sooner I file this story, the sooner I’ll get offered the next one – and paid for it. Can’t slow down now.

But at some point I can’t help wondering how I’ll know when enough is enough. There’s no way to put a number on it, to say when I’ve earned this much for the week I’ll be all set. There’s always more I could be giving to charity, more I could be saving. It’s not a matter of greed; it’s more the fact that it’s hard to declare an upper limit on the amount of money you could put to good use. Now, because the work is available, I’m writing while the kids do their afterschool activities, writing after they go to bed, writing during the late-evening hours when I used to read novels or sections of the Sunday New York Times. File one more story before going to bed? Sure – maybe that editor will be burning the midnight oil as well, and I’ll wake in the morning to an email with the always welcome news that no further revisions are needed on it.

When Tim was about five years old, he and I were walking through a small empty parking lot outside a closed car wash when we chanced across a peculiar sight: coins strewn across the pavement. It wasn’t hundreds of dollars, but it was a considerable number of nickels and dimes. Yet it wasn’t enough to seem like someone had dropped a coin bag on the way to the bank or anything like that. More just like someone had opened their car door, caused a lot of change to spill out, and not had time to pick it up. Tim asked if he could take some. I said yes. He gathered about six coins, handed them to me for safekeeping, and then said “Okay, that’s enough.”

I wondered then, and still sometimes wonder, what in him decided that was enough. There were still plenty of coins remaining. And it wasn’t like he was ethically opposed to taking any at all. Nor was he concerned about having to carry the coins: he dropped them in my purse. Something in him just said “Finding money is good, but I know how much is enough for me,” though I have no idea how he found that line.

I think of that image now: Tim finding the small amount of money and deciding he could take a little of it but not a whole lot. I wish I could draw a similar line in the sand with my work; I wish I knew what was enough, and be able to tell myself at 3:00 when the kids get home from school or even 8:00 after they’re in bed that it’s time to stop working. But for now, I’m still looking at all those silvery coins, sparkling in the sun against the dark asphalt, not sure where to begin scooping them up and even less sure of where to stop.

A goal reached: No work over Christmas week!

Late last week, I looked at my roster of work in progress and upcoming assignments and realized something tantalizing: it would be possible for me to wrap up all open assignments before Christmas and not have any new ones before New Year’s. And thus I set the goal of doing just that: turning around every undone work-related task within the next several days and seeing nothing on my work-to-do list by the time the kids’ school vacation began, which is a little bit after noon today.

And I did it. What’s remarkable about this to me isn’t that I managed to get through my list but that I was even able to acknowledge that as a goal. As a freelance contractor, my work life is generally devoted to the pursuit of accruing ever more assignments. Because my freelance salary will never match what I made as a full-time corporate employee, it never seems like I’m doing enough. And I never turn work down. As a result, I never quite reach the bottom of the pile.

Until now. There’s one corporate assignment I’m still in the middle of, but I turned copy over to the project editor and I don’t expect her to review it before Christmas, so even though revisions might be waiting for me by next week, there’s nothing more I need to do on it right now. I have one story under way for the newspaper, but it involves a school that is on break until after New Year’s, so there’s nothing much I can do on that one either.

In general, I like to keep busy professionally. A freelancer must by nature be greedy about work and feel that enough is never enough. Unlike when I was a corporate employee and was all too happy to snap my laptop shut on Friday at 5 and walk out the door, I like knowing there’s always a bit of a backlog waiting for me; with this kind of work, it’s not a desirable thing to see the well run dry.

But the past two months have been robust for me in terms of work, and it will be okay to have a week or two with no new assignments. I’m excited to have the same vacation schedule as my children. Normally when they are home from school during vacations or professional days, we have a good schedule worked out: I work during the morning and then devote the afternoon to them. But this week and next, I won’t even need those mornings. They neither need nor expect my undivided attention every minute of the day – they are old enough and independent enough that they both have things they like to do on their own, or with friends – but what a luxury it will be to make myself available to them without the stipulations of needing just an hour to get this article done or just a little time this morning to conduct phone interviews.

Psychologically, the situation of being deadline-free just puts me in a different frame of mind than usual. Even the projects that are awaiting information from other people – like my manuscript, in search of a publisher – isn’t on my mind this week, since it’s easier to just assume that everyone else is taking the week off as well and won’t have any news for me until after New Year’s. In the past, time away from work tended to involve thinking about more work: drafting new pieces or seeking out article ideas. But for now, I’m sated. I’m simply not going to think about work this week, or partway into next if possible. I’m even going to take the next two days off from daily blogging.

Instead, along with having time with my children, I’m looking forward to some household projects, visits with friends, maybe snowshoeing. (Getting the kids out on snowshoes would be an astounding feat, but a mom can dream.) Maybe in a few days I’ll have recovered from the mad dash of holiday baking and cooking enough that I’ll want to do some more cooking. Probably the kids and I will observe our annual tradition of going to Starbucks to drink hot chocolate and write thankyou notes one of the days following Christmas.

At the moment, I have three more hours while they are still at school, so I think I’ll use the time wisely by wrapping their presents. They can help me with other wrapping when they get home. And maybe, as I resolved in this blog yesterday, I’ll try to do some housecleaning.

It’s wonderful to be on vacation. I feel like a college student done with finals. I’m really grateful for all the work I’ve had lately. And I’m equally grateful to be taking a short break from all of it.

Giving thanks for...an interesting work life

With exactly a week left until Thanksgiving, I’ve decided to devote the next seven days to blogging about things for which I’m thankful. Not the massive things like food, shelter, the health of my family and friends, my children’s happiness, the relative peace and safety in our immediate environment, but the quirkier things…the ones that don’t necessarily merit mention at a church service or a Thanksgiving dinner but which nonetheless grace my every day with their welcome presence.

Today, for example, I’m feeling grateful for my work life. When I lost my full-time job seventeen months ago, I believed the situation was disastrous. And quite honestly, there was no shortage of people agreeing with me on that count. My job provided my family’s regular source of income and our health insurance.

Nearly a year and a half later, I’m still self-employed. I haven’t given up on the possibility of finding full-time salaried work, but at this time of focusing on giving thanks for what I have rather than apologizing for what I don’t, I’m feeling so thankful for the way my workday has evolved ever since I lost my job. I now have six clients for whom I work with varying regularity, and they are all different. This week I’m feeling especially attuned to the variety since I have deadlines for all six.

One is a major city newspaper, which gives my writing a high profile, a widespread audience and an affiliation with an age-old Boston tradition. I’m honored to have occasional assignments with the paper, and I love tracking down stories. On the mornings that I have a section cover story coming out, I’m a little like a child on Christmas, bounding down the stairs to see what’s on the doorstep. And the funny thing is I’m not even the person in the story; I’m just the byline at the top. Which plenty of readers skip right over. But it still gives me a sense of delight to write for the Boston Globe.

Another client is our local community newspaper, for which I’ve written off and on since I was in college. In fact, my first paying job, when I was sixteen, was as a proofreader for that same paper. Now I write feature stories and monthly columns for them. While it doesn’t have the prestige of the Boston Globe, everyone in town reads the Mosquito and sees my work in it. There’s no great honor in being on the Mosquito staff, but there’s the pride any writer can take in a job well done, regardless of the newspaper’s standards. And I always try for a job well done.

One of my corporate clients is a medical website. It’s challenging work, writing SEO-driven content on topics I know very little about. It’s not always fun, but it’s a good workout for my project management skills, reminding me to focus on what I’m doing and fact-check carefully.

I also write for the Concord Academy alumni magazine. For that job, I interview alumni with interesting careers or accomplishments. They’re always happy to hear from me. Some say “I can’t believe you want to write about me!” and others say “I was wondering when you’d call.” But no one ever turns me down, and it’s always a pleasure for me to hear people talk about their passions.

Another corporate client is a municipal management firm. Although it’s something of a joke between the principal consultant and me that I know so little about the arcane details of municipal management, it’s a little like having an administrative role in a medical practice: that is, even if it’s not what you spent years studying, we all have medical needs so it doesn’t hurt to learn more about them from a professional standpoint. Not only did I not care what my community’s Town Administrator did before I had this job, I’m not even sure I knew we had a Town Administrator. Even if I haven’t exactly caught on fire with it professionally, I now know the difference between the Planning Board and the Zoning Board, and I know how to avoid violating the Open Meeting Law. Also the people we work with on things like town master plans are usually volunteers with a special orientation toward civic involvement, and as such they tend to be kind, smart, generous people. Even if drafting a study on how public versus private well water can meet the economic development goals of town X isn’t as much fun as some of my assignments for other clients, I’m glad I have this one too.

And the sixth one is a placement agency that occasionally sends me to random offices to do a day’s worth of editing, proofreading or copy editing in place of a sick or vacationing staff member. I like the anonymity of temping. Because you’re only there for the day, no one feels obligated to forge a relationship with you. They hand you work and generally ignore you. I wouldn’t want to spend forty hours a week in that situation, but it’s fascinating to be nearly invisible in someone else’s office for the day. And besides, when you’re temping you get to experience the exuberance of leaving an office for the last time, every single day.

So that’s what I’m especially thankful for today: the patchwork that makes up my workday, and the serendipitous fact that only by losing a job I never wanted to lose did I get to experience this. Not only that, but being self-employed gives me time to enjoy my own household, attend school events, walk the dog or go running midmorning, and generally live the kind of stress-free daily life that mothers who work full-time out of the house miss out on experiencing. I’m thankful for much bigger and more important things than interesting clients, but today, in the interest of being thankful for the smaller things, I’ll give thanks for them as well.