I’ve been pinging recently.

Not in the computer sense, although I do a lot of that, too. But I’ve been pinging people.

Pinging is a great concept I learned a year or so ago from the book Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time.

I don’t have the energy or will for the level of networking this book recommends, but the idea of pinging resonated with me (ping! ping! ping!) and now, every time my work and energy get soggy, I crank up the pinging.

Pinging is just a little poke at people to remind them you’re there and you care. I’m a pretty regular pinger in general. Granted, I tend to be a virtual pinger—I’m not big on the chatty phone call, so sue me. But if I know you and like you and come across an article or idea I think you’d like, I’ll send it along. I’ll sometimes go to my favorite e-card Web site and send a card that makes me laugh with the hope that it will make you laugh, too. If I come across an article by a writer I know, I stick it in an envelope and send it to him or her. I use this blog to ping. If I mention friends, I let them know (because I make no assumptions about who does or “should” read this). And I like to comment on friends’ blogs. Ping! It’s networking of a sort, but it’s a lot more fun than the word “networking” sounds.

I’ve been underemployed recently so I started pinging with a purpose. Queries are a form of pinging. Even if I don’t have specific ideas, I’ve been dropping notes to editors I’ve worked with in the past to say “hi.” I’ve done a lot of lunch recently. Maybe a lunch leads to work, maybe to ideas for articles, maybe just to a solidified relationship. All good things.

Now I find myself with a nice little pile of work. None of it is particularly sexy, but the checks will turn me on. I’ve got a passel of new ideas I need to package and start pitching. I feel reconnected to my career. And all it took was a little pinging.

Ping, ping, PING!

Labels: career, freelancing, self-employment, work, writing

A friend’s husband has recently gone into business for himself and as she talked about this, I got to thinking about the roller coaster that is self-employment. I've been riding this ride for more than a decade.

What does it take to work for oneself?

First, it takes a certain amount of self-delusion. When I went freelance in the mid 1990s, I sincerely believed that the world was waiting for my words (alliteration and all). Had I known how difficult it would be to persuade people to buy them, I might not have waved bye-bye to my job so gleefully. Well, actually, that’s a lie. I would have. I was very unhappy in my last job and having spent most of my working life self-employed, I couldn’t wait to regain control of my time. But stepping out into the world of freelancing was a rude awakening. Huh—all those newspaper editors who loved my stories when they got them free on the Knight-Ridder wire were somewhat less anxious to run them when they had to pay for them. I couldn’t even get responses from some I knew personally. Huh. Go figger. (How sympathetic am I now to those editors, as they lose their jobs and start freelancing? Not terribly. Welcome to my world. Sink or swim.)

Self employment takes discipline. Mine ebbs and flows. Sometimes I can crank out queries and stories like a little Sophie machine, sometimes I play a lot of Scrabbulous while awash in guilt and shame. Sometimes I need an extreme self-ass kicking to get back on track.

Self employment requires tolerance for guilt and shame. When your workday is not proscribed by set hours and a reliable paycheck, you never feel like you’re doing enough. No matter how much I accomplish in a day, I could do more. No matter how much I earn, it should be more. No matter how many bylines I get, they’re in the wrong magazines. Guilt and shame are my co-workers. I embrace them.

Self employment requires tolerance for solitude. If your business, like mine, doesn’t have employees, you spend a lot of time alone. That’s why God made the Internet. The virtual world is my water cooler. I also try to plan at least one lunch date a week to make sure I don’t go all Red Rum.

Self employment requires creative money management skills. It’s one thing to manage your money with a paycheck, it’s something else altogether to manage it when you don’t know from month to month what will be coming in. In tight times, I go into spending lockdown and all nonessential spending stops. When money is coming in, I make sure to handle the important stuff, like going to the dentist.

Self employment requires a network of sympathetic souls. Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen except other freelance writers. Ours is a particular circle of heaven and hell combined. When our work goes well, little is more satisfying. When it doesn’t, it feels like very personal failure. The weight of rejection gets unbearably heavy from time to time.

And it’s a vicious circle for us—the more we need work the more we have to pitch, the more we pitch the more we open ourselves up for rejection, the more rejection we get the harder it is to be motivated, the less motivated we are, the less work we have. And round and round and round.

I’m in a state of mega burn-out right now. I’m tired, discouraged, broke and feeling unloved. So after I get this post up, I’m calling up a friend in the same business as I who has kindly volunteered to be a sympathetic, empathetic ear. Dollars to donuts (mmm, donuts would help too) I’ll feel better after talking to her. Friends can take the "self" out of self-employment.

Labels: freelancing, personal growth, self-employment, writing