Real Words

The past year has been a year of constant change for me in terms of the writing work that I have been doing. I started off the year working on a few travel blogs, technology blogs and wrapping up my part of the book that I co-authored on Alternative Home Building. These days I’m doing less travel blogging, more technology and working on a book proposal for a San Francisco travel book. So some things are the same and some things are different.

The thing about freelancing, at least for me, is that there has to be this constant balance of stability and change. I like having the same clients for a long period of time and doing steady work for them. However, I don’t really like just doing the same thing over and over again without starting any new projects. The difficulty seems to lie in learning how to start new things without failing to give attention to the older projects.

I was once told by a friend that I’m the kind of person who is a “fire starter”. I love to get projects going but I don’t like to maintain them over time. I’m always interested in moving on to the next new thing. Freelancing works well for me because there are always new projects to get excited about. But moving on to new things all of the time makes it hard to feel like there is any consistency in the work that I do so I’ve had to learn to hang on to jobs that I don’t always love to keep some stable work around.

It’s definitely something that has to be balanced. And something I’m learning better how to do each day.

Question of the Day: How do you balance the desire for steady work with the desire to have exciting new projects going on all of the time?