I haven't taken an actual vacation since I started freelancing, but I have one coming up later this month so we'll see if this happens to me too!

My next bit of advice — to keep the momentum, you also must keep some time aside for the fiction. If you drop it now and try to pick it up later, the work will dry up again. I find that each arena feeds the other, and if I maintain parallel, steady progress on both, the work continues to flow. If I tip too much one way or the other, I start to hit snags.

It took far too long and with too many obstacles to actually learn that, so I'm sharing it,hoping to save others some time and frustraton!

No, I've never lost a job due to holiday time. If anything, the holiday brings me more work. When I was doing this full time I'd schedule in the holiday around the work and get everything done before I went. There were times when I was posting the envelope on my way to the airport. I was really, really anal in those days about advance planning and my diary was booked up to 3 months ahead. If month 3 had a gap in it, I'd panic.

With your other question in a previous post about getting yourself out of a slump, what I do is this. I get my dates diary out and my calendar for the coming 6 – 12 months and I find anniversaries of interest. I list all the possible slants, and then I try to identify several magazines/markets that might be interested. Then I send out up to 6 ideas to up to 6 magazines. Law of averages says a good enough percentage will bite, and they always did. Twice I had 2 markets wanting the exact same piece, so I had to do more work on those to make them different.

Another thing I do is go through my old stuff, see what can be recycled as reprints, tidy them up, then send them to a reprint market.

But in future, I'll also do what you have done and what Devon suggests: I'll get going on some non-contracted stuff. Or book a holiday. :o)

Sorry, long one there. I shoud've made it a post of my own. :oD

Okay. Seeing how well it worked for Lori, I think I'll start a new script or drag out the children's books I've never been pleased with. Or maybe I'll do some knitting or felting.