freelancing

Last week, this week, and a month from now (yay NaNoWriMo!)

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I know I said I’d start posting my goals again last Monday, but then I got slammed with work. So far this freelance biz is feast or famine, and my regular clients all seem to be on the same cycle as to when they have work for me. I’m not complaining. The busy times are great, as they mean we get to eat and pay the mortgage, and the stress of multiple deadlines isn’t nearly as burdensome as the stress of wondering how to pay the bills.

My brain was pretty fried by Friday night, though, and I spent the weekend trying not to think about work and just recover so I could dig in again this week, which promises to be another busy one. I actually had planned to get a lot done on Saturday, including blogging and posting the next ep of This Old Haunt, but I got hit with a pretty bad headache, and all I managed to get done were some errands and a few scenes of Hero Factor marked up for revisions. Then I spent Sunday puttering around the house getting the cleaning and laundry done. Well, mostly done. I’m still waiting on the last load to dry so I can put it away before I get to work on client projects.

I also put out the Halloween decorations yesterday, which made me ridiculously happy. I love October and Halloween so hard. (more…)

By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Why being too focused is a bad thing.

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If you’ve been reading the Twitter updates that get gathered up and posted here once a day, then you already know I’ve got a perfectly good excuse for not posting anything else last week–I was bogged down with a big web redesign project that the client needed done ASAP. I kept my head down in hyperfocus mode, coming up with mockup after mockup trying to capture what the clients wanted, and feeling frustrated and a bit depressed because everything I came up with was just passably adequate and completely uninspired. I was giving them everything they asked for, but nobody was happy with it. (more…)

By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

One of these things is not like the other: macabre surprises, police apathy, and this week’s goals

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I just posted Episode 8 of This Old Haunt, in which Ron learns her true feelings and Sarah shows her true colors.

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If you were following my Twitter stream last night, then you already know about the disturbing discovery I made yesterday while picking up trash in my front yard. We live on the corner of a busy arterial street, just a few blocks down from some pretty unsavory apartments, the kind that has been on the news for gang-related activities, and where we can hear gunshots fired on a fairly regular basis. The sidewalk running along our yard sees a lot of foot traffic, and I’m constantly having to pick up trash that people toss on our lawn. I’ve never found anything worse than broken beer bottles and cigarette butts, until yesterday.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Understanding what it means to work for myself

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It’s been an awesomely busy and productive week, with no shortage of paying work waiting for me each day. I’ve been trying out a new work schedule all week — not starting until 3 and working as late as I need to — and so far it’s going great. 3 PM is early enough that I can still handle East Coast business calls if I need to, and late enough that my brain fog has completely lifted and I’m able to get focused and stay that way for many hours. Because it doesn’t matter how early or late I get up, I’m never fully awake until around 3:00, and evening has always been when I’m most energetic and able to concentrate. I am and have always been a night owl, and after a couple of decades of conditioning to conform to a day person schedule, I’m finally realizing that I have the freedom to keep night owl hours.

I don’t know why that realization has taken so long to sink in. I think it’s partly because I’ve also had a hard time understanding that I’m my own boss and it’s okay to keep my own hours. I started out viewing my clients more as supervisors, because that’s what I was used to, and thinking that I had to keep the same hours they did and be available during their office hours — never mind that they’re spread out over four time zones. I was really not enjoying myself.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Late-night goal setting

[Cross-posted from Daydream Believer]

It’s Sunday night. I’m blogging my goals for the week now because I have a lot of work scheduled for the next couple of days and I need to get the extraneous (read: unpaid) stuff out of the way.

Last week started really well, but the end of the week saw plenty of fail. This is mainly due to staying up too late several nights in a row and not getting enough sleep, which left me struggling really hard to find focus and enough brain power to concentrate on my work the last half of the week. I managed, but it was far from a good time.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Let’s set some goals.

It’s hard to think about goals for the whole week on a Monday morning when your brain is rebelling against the entire concept of work and wishing it could go back to sleep for about five more hours. It’s also hard, knowing I have a lot to get done today, to think past just getting through this day. But despite all of that, I’m off to a decent start, and hopefully this goal post (SCORE! o/) will help keep the momentum going.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Productive Daydreaming

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer)

You might have guessed from the title of this blog that I do a lot of daydreaming. Or not–I guess you might have just thought I was a Monkees fan. Or a Neil Diamond fan. Or just a fan of that one song. I do quite like the song, actually. Not only is it probably the most widely-known of the very small handful of songs with my name in them, but I identify even more with it because I do tend to be sleepy quite often, and to need cheering up on occasion. The part about the homecoming queen, however, couldn’t be LESS about me. I mean, I was once crowned the 8th grade Autumn Carnival Queen for selling the most prize drawing chances, but that was more about nerd achievement than popularity. Digression, you are an unwieldy muse.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago

Goal FAIL

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer)

Pants Fail: It’s almost noon and I’m still in the shorts and tank top that I wore to bed last night. At some point I’m going to have to at least put on a bra for the sake of the air conditioner repairman, but I’m not feeling particularly motivated to go beyond that, considering our current lack of AC.

Health Fail, with a side of Breakfast Fail: I was on a pretty good workout streak the last couple of weeks, getting up early and going to my sister’s to work out with her in her nice little home gym setup. But she’s back in school this week (she teaches), and neither of us are willing to get up as early as we’d need to to get in a workout before she has to head to work. I have every intention of putting our stationary bike to good use and getting back into a Pilates routine, but so far I just can’t be bothered. And to compound matters, this morning I was all out of my Kashi cereal, and couldn’t be arsed to prepare anything requiring more effort than said cereal. And so instead of a healthy and nutritious breakfast, I helped myself to a bowl of Husband’s Cap’n Crunch. I’m on a bit of a sugar high right now, but I know I’m going to regret it so hard later.

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By Jean Marie Bauhaus, ago