Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Did You Hear the One About . . .?

I'm sorry I've been out of commission the past week. I've had that pesky chest cold that it seems everyone has this year -- the one where you cough for at least a month. I finally organized my e-mail last night and will finish that correspondence this evening, hopefully. I'm pretty sure I lost one of my long-standing clients yesterday, due to the state of the economy and restructuring within the company, but I was expecting it and luckily picked up a new publication with the exact same pay scale a few months ago. The ebb and flow of freelancing!
I really enjoyed this post about how to head off freelance disasters yesterday. Yes, I have experienced all of these and more:
  • I've had sources hound me to be experts in articles and then, during the interview, pretty much say my article topic isn't really relevant to their expertise.
  • I've interviewed sources who then wanted to change all their quotes to medical mumbo jumbo when I provided quotes to them for fact-checking before turning in an article.
  • I had a PR rep recently contact me so her client could be an expert for an article. Then she proceeded to reschedule the time and day of the interview no less than seven times over the next week. Luckily, I had learned from my previous freelance disasters and found a few other sources to cover myself off. I finally had to tell the rep that obviously her client had a very busy schedule, and I would just proceed with the sources I had already interviewed. This resulted in one last, frantic e-mail and phone call on her part, but I had moved on by then.
Do you have any crazy freelance-writing disasters to share? How did you deal with them?

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