The Price of Time

Two weeks showed up in the mail on Friday, a check from one of my magazine clients. The fact that the check was long overdue was besides the point—money these days is time.

I know about what I need to survive each month, and each check represents a little piece of time. Enough pieces of time, and I can take some time off to relax. I don’t imagine that will be happening for a while, honestly.

So I keep a spreadsheet with assignments, and I have enough assignments to survive about six months. Not necessarily thrive, but it’s all about survival right now. And those little assignments of time mean I’ll be doing this for six months. That’s good.

I’ve been reading Mike Perry’s Handbook to Freelance Writing, and a passage of Mike’s that stuck with me states that he’s always six months away from a desk job. I guess he sees money as freedom as well as time.

Freedom. That concept is just starting to sink in, possibly beginning last week when I realized that I had enough work in the hopper to feel like this may actually work.

The CEO at MBI was concerned about the long lead time between the time I made this decision and the time I left. I wanted time to get some contracts signed and preparations made, and my boss wanted me to sort out some of my projects before I left, so we managed to convince the CEO to be patient.

While the time has been good in terms of getting some things lined up, the wait has been hard. There’s nothing worse than knowing something hard is coming that you don’t quite know how to deal with, and not having much time to do anything about it.

So it has been a long fall, with too much time to worry and too little to work.

Happily, however, the wait is nearly over, and I find my mind turning to finding a market for a Kodiak Island ride and weighing whether it is worth writing a sample chapter on spec rather than comparing health insurance plans and figuring out how to manage 401K plans. A welcome change.

I’m looking forward to the day when marketing concerns turn to crafting phrases and choosing f-stops.