When you’re working for 8 hours a day, stuck in a small cubicle and get tired because of the long commute, you start to yearn the life of a freelancer. To you, and perhaps to so many people as well, freelancing is the ideal way to live and work. Just think about it: a freelancer decides when she will work, she can easily stop what she’s working on and do something else, she gets to set her own rates, and most of all, she doesn’t have a boss.

Sounds highly interesting, isn’t it? But the truth is freelance writing is more than just writing by your lonesome self and having less of the typical office worries. It definitely involves so much more than that. To get you a feel on what really involves freelance writing, at least the behind-the-scenes, here are a few things to know:

A Freelance Writer Should Be a Jack of All Trades

She has to make cold calls to find clients, she has to do the accounting, the billing and the follow ups when the client becomes late in payments. The freelance writer must also know a few things about computers and how to fix them when something goes down.

A Freelance Writer Must Learn How to Handle Many Bosses… All at Once

The notion that freelancers don’t have a boss is a myth. The freelance writer has lots of bosses – clients – at any given time. If you don’t want to communicate with many ‘bosses’ and try your best to accommodate all their wishes, then freelancing is not for you.

A Freelance Writer Don’t Have Holidays… Usually

If you are working in an office and you want to take a leave of absence, more probably there is someone there who can cover for you for a day or two. But that’s not the case if you are doing freelance work. When you are swamped with writing assignments, you can’t simply declare that you want to take a leave and go on a vacation. You are liable to your clients and you have deadlines to meet. If you are working alone, you don’t have the luxury of just hanging your pen and going to the movies any time you want.

These and many others are among the the reasons why full-time freelance writing is not meant for everyone. If you are a people person, you can work with zero supervision, and you can understand and deliver what clients want, then you can follow in the footsteps of the countless freelance writers who have found success in this exciting field.