“The x factor” sounds much cooler than “I don’t know what I’m doing next”

This week it sunk in how unusual last year was for a freelancer.
Thanks to my eHow writing I had a set schedule: X number of eHows a week, 12 hours fiction and so on. That got heavily upended by the chaos at the end of the year, and by finding the tech eHows I was doing increasingly tough going, but it was still pretty regular. And I could reasonably anticipate how much I would bring in at the end of the month.
Since February, not so much. Adding other projects has been good (oh, my Hyperink short book on Empire of the Summer Moon is now out!) but the flip side is, my schedule is a lot harder to plan.
For example, I’ve been doing articles for one of eHows special projects, but I didn’t know this week—and don’t know for next week—how many to anticipate. Knowing they take longer than the regular eHows, I structured my schedule so that I got lots of fiction writing done in the first few days, so I’d have more time free for the specials. But that meant not doing any regular eHows so I had time for fiction … Had their not been any specials this week I doubt I’d have made up the difference (tech articles are too tough for me to do too many in a day).
On the other hand,they now have a second special project which pays almost as much, but looks like it’ll require extra effort: As I don’t know how much effort, how much time should I budget?
And if I commit time to them (one thing about these special projects, Demand Media discourages dropping articles, which I’ve done with many of the regular eHows) and a cool Raleigh Public Record story comes up, where do I carve out time?
I’d also like to do another Hyperink project, but since part of the pay is royalties, I don’t know yet how much time to budget for. I think I can do the next one much quicker than I did the first (I’m much less stressed for time just now) but I’m not sure.
Still, while it was nice having a dependable, set schedule, having lots of options is cool too. So long as I get my fiction done and pay the bills, all is well, no matter how I may fret.
Speaking of fiction:
•Brain From Outer Space progresses. Slowly. I’m moving into new scenes rather than just rewriting old ones, which will probably slow me further (my first drafts, as I’ve noted before, suck).
•I finished redrafting The Eye of White Cathay, but it’s still not working. I think radical surgery is called for: I came up with a couple of ideas before wrapping up work this week, and I’ll play with them next week.
•I have no clue on how to rework The Impossible Takes a Little Longer. Okay, I have one idea, but I’m not sure I can make it work. More mulling next week.
•I spent a lot of time reworking the opening of an old novel, Let No Man Put Asunder. I was originally going to type it into my computer (it was composed on an older, incompatible and now defunct one) but as I’ve lost 2/3 of the manuscript, I’m making more changes than planned. I want to sell this one more than any of my other early unpublished novels (early meaning pre-Impossible) and I think it’s the best of them. Certainly the one I feel most connected to.
•I completed a story for Raleigh Public Record, but it’s not online yet.
•Some more work on the ghost-writing gig. My client’s revisions to the basic setting have undercut a lot of my plot, so it’s back to the drawing board next week.
•Mage’s Masquerade came back, but went out again, along with two others.
And that’s it. All things considered, a productive week. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.