Insecurity

 Okay, so I have a pretty big head. I know I am trained to write. I am confident in my writing skills, and I feel I put out some pretty good stuff. I even go back over my stuff and find spots where I pat myself on the back and tell myself those were genius.

However, the moment I finish a project and hand it over to an employer is the moment the nerves in my stomach start to build. I like my work, and my employer must have liked my work enough to hire me, but I am never 100% certain he or she will be happy with what I produce. 

In the course of my career, I have had people who were not happy. In most cases, I can fix it with my first rewrite. In some cases, it did not reflect the quality of my work but rather the ignorance of the person hiring me. One person complained because I could not put a square image on a kindle page. I did not distort the image at all, I merely trimmed it and slightly changed the placement of some of the text. Without changing the ratio, the image would have shrunk and only filled half the screen. She was irate. 

The other one was a guy who had written a screenplay. This guy was in the business of making school posters. He had no writing or film experience. All he wanted was for me to give him my opinion of the screenplay. I did--it was awful. He then called me and cussed me out for 30 minutes. He told me every other freelancer he had hired thought it was amazing. I told him it couldn't be produced as written. He said he had an "in" with the Navy so he knew it would be produced. (This was a work of fiction that mildly referenced the Navy, by the way.) It was big and ugly, and it didn't help on my end that after he berated me, I charged him full price instead of the discount I had originally given him. Sorry, if you want to cuss me out and berate me, I charge extra.

Needless to say, despite the rave reviews from all the other freelancers he hired, I have never seen this movie produced. 

Anyway, until I get feedback I sit waiting anxiously for some. Today, I am distracting myself by working on something else.