I’ve been seeing a lot of these articles lately. Writers shoveling advice onto existing freelancers (who don’t need it), when their real mission is to glorify the freelancer’s lifestyle. Make more money in less time! Work in your pajamas! As a current freelancer who also worked in an office, I think the office 9-5 is underrated.

Not that I’d ever want to work in an office again, but as a third-year MFA student my Emerson tenure is quickly coming to a close and I’m looking at my options for full-time-ish employment. Something that gives me flexibility and the mental freedom to continue working on what matters the most (writing), but still lets me, you know, live. Many of my peers are currently teaching and plan to continue in that field once their degree is in hand. And that’s spectacular, for them. But what about the rest of us who don’t want to teach? Or who don’t want to teach full time?

I began putting (whoring) myself out there about two months ago. The services I offer: article writing, copywriting, copyediting, non-literary translation and just about anything else I can convince someone to pay me for. And I’ve been lucky enough to find at least one short-term gig in each of these areas. In the last three weeks I’ve easily put thirty hours a week into my freelance work and have made $820. So if you’re bad at math, that’s a smidgeon over $9/hour. And since I charge anywhere between $15-$40 an hour for a service (making sure I’m well under the standard rate – again, whoring), there must be a reason that I can’t pay rent AND have less time to write.

One reason is that I’ve pretty new at it and so a lot of my time is spent looking for new work. But another reason is that much of what these articles don’t mention is how much unavoidable, unbillable time is spent in a day. I spoke to Reshma Mehta, a graphic designer and owner of her own company A Burst of Color. She spends 9-10 hours a day at work, but can only bill for about 5. Things like research, reviewing contract, hunting people down who haven’t paid, new client meetings, and rate negotiations all fall into that un-billable time.

Reshma estimates it takes two years for a freelancer to become established, and that you can actually lose money on things like taxes and insurance.And that doesn’t take into account other pitfalls for writers, such as your house feeling more like an office (I’ve begun escaping to the cafes near my home to write), and business writing sometimes stunting your creative writing. I’ve decided to dive headfirst into freelance writing because a) its location-flexible (I married an immigrant and expect to be out of the country for long periods of time), b) because I don’t want to go the tenure professor route, and c) I’m anti-social so working alone is ideal. And, most importantly, if I decide to take a few months off here and there to focus on a book/collection/project, I can.

But, I don’t know. For writers who want to leave their work at work, a steady paycheck, someone telling you what and what not to do, an office job might not be the worst thing in the world. I’m still figuring it all out myself.

Although it had immediately been ridiculed by rival newspapers, which had managed to draw on the inspiration of their principal writers for the most diverse and meaty of headlines, some dramatic, some lyrical and others almost philosophical or mystical, if not touchingly ingenuous, as was the case with the popular newspaper that contented itself with And What Will Become Of Us Now, ending the phrase with the graphical flourish of an enormous question mark, the aforementioned headline New Year, New Life, for all its grating banality, had struck a real chord with some people who, for reasons either of nature or nurture, preferred the solidity of a more or less pragmatic optimism, even if they had reasons to suspect that it might be merely a vain illusion. Having lived, until those days of confusion, in what they had imagined to be the best of all possible and probable worlds, they were discovering, with delight, that the best, the absolute best, was happening right now, right there, at the door of their house, a unique and marvelous life without the daily fear of parca’s creaking scissors, immortality in the land that gave us our being, safe from any metaphysical awkwardnesses and free to everyone, with no sealed orders to open at the hour of our death, announcing at that crossroads where dear companions in this vale of tears known as earth were forced to part and set off for their different destinations in the next world, you to paradise, you to purgatory, you down to hell. Because of this, the more reticent or more thoughtful newspapers, along with like-minded radio and television stations, had no option but to join the high tide of collective joy that was sweeping the country from north to south and from east to west, refreshing fearful minds and driving far from view the long shadow of thanatos. With the passing days, and when they saw that still no one died, pessimists and skeptics, only a few at a time at first, then en masse, threw in their lot with the mare magnum of citizens who took every opportunity to go out into the street and proclaim loudly that now life truly is beautiful.
—José Saramago, Death with Interruptions, 14-15.