Authors Electric

                                                                      I consider the ups and downs of being a freelance businesswoman and creative, and why it is sometimes a battle to be taken seriously. It’s a stormy day in what promises to be a sweltering summer, and am I relaxing with my feet up on this ‘day of rest’? Don’t be silly, I’m self-employed! Time off? You must be joking! Whilst you nine-to-fivers can make plans for the weekends and evenings, every time I do something other than my actual job, I lose money. So, I work seven days a week, every evening and a bit of Saturday and Sunday morning. Yes, I love what I do, and you know what they say – if you love what you do you never work a day in your life. Well, it sure feels like hard work sometimes, I can tell you. ...

Sadly I'm not the only freelance writer who's had to wait (sometimes months) for a client to pay what they owe for work completed. So last year when I became aware of a petition that called for the government to pass a law to force employers to pay on time for freelance and contractual work I signed it. Today (07/01/17) I received a reply which I felt may be of interest to freelancers and contractors. So here it is: " A party acting in the course of a business can claim interest and reasonable recovery costs if another business is late paying for goods or a service. A party acting in the course of a business can claim interest and reasonable recovery costs if another business is late paying for goods or a service, under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. In April 2017, the payment practices reporting requirement will come into force. This will require large companies and LLPs to report publicly on their payment practices and performanc...

“So, young man, what do you plan to do with your life?” It’s one of the most annoying questions that well-meaning people ask of the young as soon as they leave school or university, and at most points before and in between. It may be annoying, but even the most innocent, or rebellious, of young people know that finding the answer is the key to everything. When you get to the other end of your working life and look back, these people are asking, what sort of path do you want to see stretching out behind you? In some ways I was one of the fortunate ones. From the age of sixteen I had an almost clear idea of what I wanted that path to look like, but when I described it out loud it sounded pretty naïve, not to mention vain, so I tended to respond to interrogation by looking down and mumbling something non-committal like everyone else. What I knew I wanted was to be free to follow anything that caught my interest. I wanted to attack life like an overexcited dog hur...

I first published a version of this article in the Guardian on-line, so please forgive me if parts of it sound familiar.  I left school with a burning urge to lead the life of a writer; travelling like Byron, fêted like Wilde before his fall, creating laughter like Wodehouse and crafting sentences like Nabokov. I had no professional contacts so I wrote my masterpieces speculatively and every path I went down ended with a rejection slip or total silence. The perceived wisdom then, as now, was that earning a living as a writer was about as likely as winning a lottery. Then I discovered the secret of marketing. Instead of writing things and trying to persuade people to buy them, I would find out what writing services people needed and offer to provide them. So, at the same time as begging publishers and editors for commissions, I made myself available to anyone who might want to write an article or a book but did not feel able to do it for themselves. I have ju...

          I hadn't heard my son coming into the office as I typed away at some self-promotional piece of blogging or tweeting or whatever was the social media flavour of that day. He only needed to stand behind me for a moment to grasp what I was doing, being a world-class reader of screens.           "Whoring yourself again?" he enquired cheerfully before ambling off to stare into the fridge for a while.           The bluntness of his comic timing made me laugh, as it often does, then I got thinking. "Whoring yourself again" is pretty much the perfect definition of freelance life. I've spent time with a great many people who have at some stage been involved in prostitution, either voluntarily or enforced. You sell your body or you sell your brain - either way you run the risk of ending up selling your soul. Most writers hate promoting themselves, al...