Burn-out

I managed 5 hours' sleep last night but don't feel rested and my eyeballs feel like they have been sandpapered. I have a splitting headache and don't want to work today, although I'll have to.

Yesterday, I spilled about some of these problems on one of the hack forums I hang out on. One friend told me to book a holiday. She's right - this is the 2nd time this year she's told me I need a break. I've not had a holiday since I spent a week in Larnaca a year ago (and it wasn't a happy trip - I split from Mr Wordsmith on our return). I've not even been away for a weekend and my only "mini-breaks" since then have been the occasional trips to the Smoke to large it with my hack colleagues on the legendary JournoBiz Massive drinking sessions. (There's 1 on tonight that I'd planned to go to, but am forced to miss because of my workload. I'm gutted as it's always great fun, and the networking is always useful too.)

I can't put a break off any longer, or I think I may crack. The insomnia is now so persistent that I've lost my appetite (and 2 kilos this week) - most days I'm forgetting to eat breakfast and in the evenings I'm so shattered I can't face cooking. And I love cooking. I feel guilty that personal emails are piling up unanswered in my inbox and on Facebook, because I never seem to have time to reply. It's amazing I still have friends, I've neglected them so badly.

One reason I've not taken a proper holiday for 12 months (and I even worked on Xmas Day!) is things were a bit chaotic on the personal front after splitting with Mr W. Then there were 2 house moves, the book to write, features to pitch and write, stuff to edit. I was very aware that I needed to up my income now I was single.

I have a serious longing to return to Crete and hike the White Mountains again. I need sunshine and good food and, more than anything else, to switch off and let my mind recharge. It'll need some planning - mah boy will need kennelling, for starters. But with luck, I'm going to be on a plane before the end of May...

Broadcast news and tears

My little weep yesterday evening at the end of a very long and stressful day reminded me this morning of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Hunter plays Jane Craig, a hard-bitten TV news producer who locks herself in her office several times a day, has a hearty cry, then pulls herself together 5 minutes later to go and bark orders at reporters William Hurt and Albert Brooks again.

I never understood why she was so weepy. For her, it was a routine part of her day. Undoubtedly, producing news is high-octane, stressful work. TV is also unbelievably shallow and fake. Broadcast News showed this 20 years ago: more recently, there has been a slew of stories in the press about faked TV programmes and crooked phone-ins. But why cry so much? I remember thinking at the time that the excessive crying by Hunter's character gave a rather skewed impression of females in the business.

I've never worked in TV and have no intention of ever doing so. Working in print is stressful enough. But I rarely cry over writing. What really stresses me is editing, when I'm not getting the right support at the other end. Hence yesterday's tears. I cried for a couple of minutes, long enough to destress, and then stopped. I have moments like that maybe half a dozen times a year. Sometimes, a good weep is the best way to let it out, then crack on.

Mind you, I can swear for England when I'm really stressed. I'm not going to repeat the filth that fell from my lips after I dried my tears, but suffice to say it would have made our troops in Iraq blush.

Friday blues

I'm beginning to seriously regret coming home from Rome. After the week I've had, you could hardly blame me.

It's not been all bad. I had an unexpected commission, with the possibility of more to come, and I have been pitching another story (no news yet but I'm hopeful). And I caught up with my best friend mid-week on the phone - we have both been so busy we haven't seen each other since just before Xmas, so that was good.

Technology has driven me to the point of insanity though - first the keyboard died, then the printer (and I still haven't had time to source a replacement). Today, my email client refused to work just moments after I'd typed an important lengthy mail to someone but before I'd hit Send. I had no alternative but to exit the programme and lose the mail. Then the same problem recurred on reopening and starting again - this time the cursor vanished. I finally got it to work again, don't ask me how.

One of my clients hasn't paid, which means I need to chase up on Monday, my veg box failed to get delivered yesterday and another client dumped urgent work on me after 4pm and I had no alternative but to do it immediately because of a 3 hour time difference.

What really pushed me over the edge was the cleaner. I took a short break mid-afternoon and nipped up to the bedroom. To cut a very long story short, suffice to say the floor was covered in pillow feathers. I wasn't going to vacuum it up myself - that's what I pay the cleaner for - and I was buggered if the carpet was going to stay like that for a whole week. So I rang the cleaner and told him to return and finish the job. But not before I'd had a solo temper tantrum. I effed and blinded, kicked things in a rage and was shocked at how heavily I'd overreacted. My heart was pounding with the stress and it took me some time to calm down.

I'm glad it's a bank holiday weekend. I clearly need time out to relax. I feel tired out and fed up but can't put my finger on why. I'll be glad when things return to normal.

Frustration!

I have a client for whom I did a major project last year - a total overhaul of her website (the original one was a disaster zone, it looked dreadful visually and the copy was appalling - badly written and full of typos - not exactly enticing for her own potential clients). I wrote 60 web pages of copy for her and brought in my graphic designer to build her a new, attractive site.

Since then, because her English is not that great, I have done various proofreading and editing jobs for her, mainly cleaning up her tenders and course literature. She has an infuriating habit of calling me at two hours' notice to do a job for her on the assumption that I can do it on the spot. She seems to think I don't have any other clients and just sit at my desk playing computer games until she deigns to call for my help. Sometimes she calls me to resolve her computer problems because she doesn't know how to use it properly. It's staggering that she has a six-figure turnover and doesn't know how to use Windows' most standard programmes. It's not as if she is uneducated, either. Once she sent me a document in a template that had come from a third party, in which she had added text to the requisite boxes. She told me the text was red when it was supposed to be black, and was scored through. I said I would try to resolve it. On opening the document, it was clear that "track changes" was switched on. I did the editing and sent it back to her, only to receive an anguished call from her that everything was still red and scored through. Patiently, I talked her through how to switch off "track changes" so that she could see the final version.

The last time she dumped a job on me at the last minute, I agreed to do it under duress as I was pretty busy that day, and asked her politely to book her work in in future so I could make time for her on my daily schedule. She agreed.

I wish.

This morning she rang me at 7.30 am to tell me she had just sent me a 20-page tender that needs editing. I was in the shower when she called and my heart sank when I played back my voice mail. I already have two urgent editing jobs booked in this morning, plus a chapter of a book I've been working on since March. The latter is less urgent but still needs to be done. I also need to start the copywriting for another client's website, as that has to be totally signed off by next Friday. And I still need to send out last month's invoices.

I was pretty pissed off. Somehow, I managed to call her back and talk to her without losing my temper. I told her firmly that this would be the last time I would reshuffle my work in order to fit her in if she doesn't give me advance warning. I insisted she call me in advance if she knows she has a job in the pipeline for me. She replied that she didn't always know exactly when something would be ready, and I countered that if she knew it would be between x and y dates that would be fine, as long as I had a rough idea of a window in which to squeeze it in. It turned out that she had this particular job ready to send last night, but she didn't bother to call me and ask if it would be possible. I told her that even last-minute jobs can be handled with some warning, even if I have to subcontract to another editor and check it over myself before it goes back to the client.

She wants the document back by 10 am. I told her it would be 12 noon. I hope the message has finally got through to her today that I am not a slave at her beck and call.

I'm very well used to turning around jobs at short notice - I used to work as a financial editor at a major investment bank, where everything was deadline-driven according to the demands of Europe's stock markets, and all the reports were written by non-native English speakers. It was damn tough, especially when you add in the need for absolute accuracy in such an environment.

But I work for myself now and I set the rules. My clients know I am very flexible but on the whole they understand why they need to book their work in with me.

Now I have to re-plan my morning completely and find the time in which to do her work.