Freelance Unbound

A quick look at this blog’s stats shows a bit of a nosedive of views over the past few days. Yes – we’re coming into Easter, and I’ve noticed that people tend to look at blogs during the working week rather than at weekends or holidays. But it’s clear that traffic has some kind of correlation to posting frequency.
I always stress the importance of keeping a blog going if you’re going to do it. The longer you leave it between posts, the less likely you are to start again, and you lose whatever audience you have pretty quickly. Basically, I’ve been ignoring my own advice on blogging these past two weeks and not updating frequently enough.
Reasons? Yes, indeedy. I was pretty ill for a week and couldn’t really face the computer – I had outpourings of a different sort to deal with, frankly. And, to be honest, there are times when I get fed up to the back teeth with journalism and the media, so I just didn’t really have anything to add to the general industry chatter. I’ve had so much work on in the past couple of weeks that I’ve pretty much burned out.
That in itself is interesting in the current climate of course. I was very worried about freelance work drying up completely before Christmas (which was something of a consensus view among freelancers I know, and was backed up by a commissioning freeze at the companies we generally work for). So I went hell for leather to pull work in in the new year – and succeeded all too well, as the overload was partly why I got ill.
So upcoming will be a post pulling together some advice on what to do in a recession to boost your employability and workload. I’m also going to write up my experiences last summer at the Bristol Animation Course and probably do a breakdown of how I made my first short animated film at the start of last year. It’ll make a nice change from this journalism malarkey, that’s for sure…