It’s been 5 years since my last post. Many reasons why, but I’m going with the story that my website and blog just fell to the bottom of the to-do list. Then got covered with a pile of papers. Then gathered dust. Lots of dust.
I have been a freelance biomedical writer and editor since 2011, so I’m coming up on the 10-year mark here (truly unbelievable how time flies). And I should know by now that my online presence is pretty important because I rely on passive marketing for new business – through networking and word-of-mouth.
But there’s something that sets the work I do – editing and writing and teaching – apart from all the other stuff I need to do in order to do that work. All the administrative stuff. Quickbooks, project planning, invoicing, timesheets, payroll, subcontracting. Really, I’d rather be writing and editing and teaching.
But I also know that investing time and effort in those administrative tasks is absolutely necessary to run my business. So I made myself find the time to get my website back under my control and learn how to update it. And now I’m determined to catch up on blogging. Seems kinda quaint in the age of Twitter and instant opinions…
I started by moving all my old blog posts over to my new website. Reading what I wrote back in 2010 has been…interesting. I’m still deciding what posts to keep and what might be best left in the past. But good or bad, it’s been wild to look back at what I was thinking when I first started freelancing. The issues I ran into, my thoughts about my profession, how I dealt with challenges – mostly time management, which is still a challenge, to be honest – and how much time I invested in engaging with my field and sharing my thoughts on what I was learning.
So hopefully I can find the time to get back to blogging regularly, as an investment in my business. A lot has happened in the last decade of freelancing, so I’m sure I can find some thoughts to share.