In addition to reposting some of those jobs I feel I must do out of loyalty to my customer-employers, I have also hired my husband to help with some of these jobs. You see, when I started I posted really low bids on jobs. This slowly increased, but the thing is that your bid never expires. An employer can hire you months later.
Now I am happy with the level of short jobs I have been getting, but I have been accumulating too many large jobs. this began with the script I just finished for MW and the confidential book I am still working on and it has grown.
I was hired by a woman to edit her dissertation - quick and easy - but she commissioned me to the end of the year. I was hired for my translation and now commissioned to the end of the year. The biggest problem is that these jobs both require me to output masses of work virtually overnight. I can translate about 10,000 words per day and edit 20,000, but if I ever get unlucky enough to get both these jobs in one day, I will be in serious trouble.
There is also always the danger that someone you once completed a job for now needs you to tweak it some more. This week a prospective doctor for whom I had trimmed and edited a personal statement in the spring has written me and asked me to tweak it again...sigh. I had to put him on hold and, he will get charged an additional fee for it since it has been so long, but still, I would rather be finished with jobs when they are done. This is my problem with Johnny5 - I keep getting jobs on the same topic. Unfortunately, I thrive on the new.
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