Writing on my new freelance project doesn't start officially until Monday, but ideally I hope to get started this weekend so I can get it all done before we go home for Thanksgiving. I'm thrilled it's a big project so that there will be lots of $$$ for baby's Christmas presents, but at the same time I'm apprehensive that this will turn into one more holiday season that I can't relax and enjoy because work is too awful.

Last year was definitely the worst. By that point in my hell project my boss had finally caught on to how much work I'd been doing by myself. I'd been so busy just getting information to writers and editing and sending what few manuscripts I could to the client (seeing as how it took them like three months to get feedback to us on the first few things we did, so we couldn't do the rest of those, and then the things we could work on kept getting changed or held up for various reasons on their side, plus there was this other part they kept picky-pants making us revise and revise and revise), that I had literally had no time to set up any organizational system for how the project was running (any masterlist of who was writing things, what materials each writer needed, etc.). Everything was in my head, and suddenly everyone was freaking out when it became apparent that they would need like four people to replace me while I went home for a week at Christmas.

It was godawful trying to train all these people who were suddenly being pulled onto my project (probably crippling other projects, because we were all in crunch mode), especially because I would barely have had enough time to get out the work I needed to before I left anyway. In the end, I totally skipped the offsite Christmas party, and even so I barely made it to the airport to catch my flight out that night.

I would have felt guiltier about leaving everyone in the lurch except I'd been working solid since before Labor Day (on weekends and Halloween, and although I did take off a few days around Thanksgiving, I slept through most of them because I was so tired from being pregnant), and I could tell that I was seriously going to have a breakdown if I didn't take some time off. The best part was that I hadn't told anyone at work I was pregnant yet because I wanted to wait until I had my 20-week sonogram. Plus I didn't want them to treat me differently, and by this point I was so sick of everything that I wanted them to feel retroactively bad that I'd gone through all of this and been pregnant on top of it. And I did leave them my cellphone number if they needed anything and called in every morning for conference calls to make sure everything was going okay (which led to me taking calls in the middle of stores while trying to get all my Christmas shopping done in two days and answering very specific questions about how things needed to be done without having any materials in front of me because I seriously had everything up in my head).

Anyway, I loved the people I worked with at my job, and were I to take on another project like this one I know now that I should go upfront to my boss at the very beginning and insist on getting more staff on it, even if that means hiring more people (instead of assuming that she knew best and that there must have been some way for me to do all the work since I was the only one she put on it). That said, except for the money (which was very good) I DO NOT miss being a project manager, and I am looking forward to just working on the writing and maybe editing parts of future projects. So this freelancing thing should work out fine, although I will be hella pissed if it does end up interfering with my holiday season because I think I deserve to have one year where my stomach isn't in knots over how much work is looming over my head.

When I did tell my boss about my pregnancy, she said she had guessed, because it wasn't like me to be so emotional (what with the weeping when writers started pulling out because the schedule was dragging on--thanks to the client--and then I wasn't going to have anyone to write once things actually started to hit). That said, when I told everyone else, no one else had suspected, although they had all seen me crying at various times.

So that's a little troubling, that they would consider it BUSINESS AS USUAL that I would be sitting there fielding e-mails and phone calls right and left while tears were running down my cheeks. But I guess it can be a crazy business, especially around the holidays.