{"id":761,"date":"2011-12-31T20:48:52","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T20:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?p=761"},"modified":"2022-08-26T08:29:38","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T08:29:38","slug":"seeing-off-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/2011\/12\/seeing-off-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing off the year"},"content":{"rendered":"
I realised that if I didn\u2019t write something today then there wouldn\u2019t be an entry for December 2011, which would be a shame. What has happened to this blog, once a goldmine of every kind of creative outpouring?<\/div>\n
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I blame Facebook. This blog used to have everything from single-line pens\u00e9es to longer pieces like this. Nowadays the shorter stuff goes on to Facebook, which is where most of its likely readers are anyway (those who aren\u2019t, get over there; chances are good that I know (of) you so I\u2019ll accept Friend requests) and it\u2019s much easier to share and interact and generally carry on the conversation. Of course I could put it here and stick a link in Facebook \u2013 but even then, all the carry-on and carry-over stuff would probably stay on Facebook. So there it goes.<\/div>\n
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Don\u2019t get me started on Google +.<\/div>\n
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So anyway. 2011.<\/div>\n
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The downs immediately come to mind, but there were ups too. A couple of very enjoyable holidays in Vence, Provence, France and in Sweden; singing in\u00a0Messiah<\/em>; a nicely lucrative slice of ghostwriting; and Bonusbarn finally entered the wonderful world of higher education. Of course, being Bonusbarn, he couldn\u2019t do this the easy way, i.e. embrace the system that is there to help him, No, no. Of his first two choices he put the one he actually wanted second; and when he got offers from both of them, he declined the first one when he should have asked them to reject him, which meant he automatically went into clearing and officially had no offers at all. Ho hum. But it all worked out.<\/div>\n
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The biggest downs of 2011 are that I started the year having no friends with cancer and ended with two. More accurately, I suppose, they both probably had it a year ago but it was only diagnosed in the intervening months. No further reports to add on this \u2013 consider it a work in progress, and as one of them so eloquently expresses it, \u201cpoo to Mr Crab\u201d.<\/div>\n
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What made the biggest impact on me was being made redundant halfway through the year. Previously I had been quite enthusiastic about the new marketing regime but I underestimated their desire to sweep clean. I wasn\u2019t the target and was merely caught by the edge of the broom, as shown by the fact that they wanted to keep me on as a freelance provider. There was no malice involved; it\u2019s just that being marketing types with no grasp of the small details, minds too full of the big picture, it was handled so ineptly that I had to think very hard about whether I really wanted to stay. I should have remembered my previous conviction that marketing is like the church and the military: you want it on your side\u00a0but it should never ever be given power<\/em>.<\/div>\n
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The redundancy offer was statutory but still generous, so the pressure to find work immediately was off. This also coincided with the start of the ghostwriting, which got me the equivalent of a novel advance for a month\u2019s work. So I gave the old place the benefit of the doubt and signed a contract that would guarantee five days work a month; more important, it guaranteed I would be paid for five days a month. If I didn\u2019t do five days, well, I could owe them a bit more work the next month.<\/div>\n
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All well and good, until they insisted on me billing them for July, in which month I had had a two hour meeting and that was all. At one stroke, I owed them nearly a month\u2019s work, and they carried on persistently not using me. I had seven years\u2019 experience that could have helped in so many ways, but no, I was the tool kept on the shelf for when they wanted some scribbling, or for when a job was too boring to waste the salaried staff on it.<\/div>\n
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Outside of the old place, I honestly intended to give the freelance life a workout, but external factors conspired to convince me that it isn\u2019t for me. I had several leads, all given to me by people I trust and who had proven experience that these leads should work \u2026 but this is Austerity Britain and No One is Hiring. Not one of those leads actually led to anything. Sure, I could have done more \u2013 actively tout my CV around the numerous science parks that dot our landscape in this part of the world \u2013 and perhaps I would have if I really had no choice. But the thought of doing that for the rest of my life \u2026 no. Just, no. At the old place I was doing more than just writing: I was engaged on many levels; I was contributing to an enterprise I really believed in. I wanted that back.<\/div>\n
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The most enthusiastic proponents of the freelance life \u2013 the two people I was reporting to at the old place, both of whom coincidentally had well-paid fulltime jobs \u2013 tried to assure me that freelancing is wonderful and rewarding, you can choose how much work to do \u2026 well, maybe on the fees they get, but at my level you need to keep working regardless. You might also think, might you not, that with all this free time on my hands, the extracurricular writing career would burgeon? Well, no, not really, because I don\u2019t currently have any work under contract. It\u2019s all on spec at the moment, and when you\u2019re writing on spec, you\u2019re not earning. So, no. The writing suffered too.<\/div>\n
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I know successful freelancing is possible, even in my sort of field, because I know people who do it and enjoy it; but none of them as far as I know had it thrust on them at a moment’s notice. I lacked the patience and the willpower to tighten the belt for the next few years to make something happen.<\/div>\n
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And then, out of the blue, along came the dreamed-for job ad \u2013 a maker of scientific instruments that required someone with just about my full skill set. Sent off the CV, got a call that same evening inviting me to an interview, got sent an editing test, got invited to a second interview, came away convinced I\u2019d blown it and then got invited back. Terminating my freelance contract requires two months\u2019 notice, so for the time being I\u2019m on three days a week until I can go fulltime at the end of February. The old place should squeeze one more newsletter out of me, and quite probably a quarterly report too, if they have any sense.<\/div>\n
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So, I finish the year in an unexpectedly different place to where I started it, but no hard feelings. I have a student stepson, an added arrow to my writing bow that wasn\u2019t there before, and my wife is lovely as ever. Happy new year, and poo to Mr Crab.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realised that if I didn\u2019t write something today then there wouldn\u2019t be an entry for December 2011, which would be a shame. What has happened to this blog, once a goldmine of every kind of creative outpouring? I blame … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,20,31],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bens-life","tag-freelance","tag-life","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":779,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}