Last Saturday night I came down with something that can only be described as an unholy cross between a Biblical plague and H1N1. Try as I might, I simply did not have the strength to get out of bed that Sunday, and by Monday I knew something was seriously wrong. If I were an employee, I would have called my boss, dutifully brought in one of my three doctor’s notes (yes, it took three trips to the doctor), and that would have been that. Because I’m my own boss, I had to take different steps.

Now, like I said, I was sick. My brain was dead, or at least boiling from fever. But luckily, I was still lucid enough to take some precautions and make sure I didn’t lose any clients while I was writhing in insurmountable pain.

First, I crawled to the computer, and after a recovering from the exertion it took to pull the darn thing onto my lap, I activated my away message. The message says this:

Hello, I will be out of the office today due to illness. If you need to reach me urgently, please call xxx-xxx-xxxx. Thank you, Freelance Writer

It’s not fancy, but it gets the point across and can be easily tailored to other situations, i.e. “illness” can be replaced with “an emergency,” or something similar. The key is not to be too detailed in your away message. It will go to anyone who emails you, not just clients.

That brings me to my second point. When I was in the corporate world, no matter how sick I was, I often felt guilty making that call saying I would be out for the day. And some employers hate it, too. They feel proprietary about your labor and demand doctor’s notes or other proof to justify your absence.

But we freelancers do not have bosses.

Well, we do. But it just so happens that my boss was also languishing with typhoid, or Dengue Fever or whatever it was that kept me down for a week. Get it? It’s me. I’m the boss. Point is, you should not feel guilty about an illness. Your clients, while they are your bread and butter and should be accorded every respect, do not own your labor. They are all a part of YOUR business. There is no need to guiltily explain all your symptoms to a client. A simple, “I’m very ill and will be unable to meet this deadline,” will suffice.

Now your responsibility also does not stop there. If I had been slated to meet a big deadline last week and knew that I wouldn’t make it, I would have been obligated to help my clients out. Again, as a freelancer, they are a part of your business, a part you are responsible for, and leaving them in the lurch damages your professional reputation.  You could have offered to complete the work at a later date or pass the work on to another freelancer.

The key again is to crawl to your laptop and get proactive.

A last note I want to leave you with is a piece of my mom’s advice: Don’t overdo it.

If you have a 102 fever and feel like a train just backed over all your joints simultaneously, then don’t promise to be back to work tomorrow. If you are really that ill, see a doctor and get some realistic perspective on a timeframe for returning to work. Getting back to work too soon can result in shoddy writing and unhappy clients. Make sure you are up to the task before hopping back on the proverbial freelance writing horse.

(Also, posterity, when judging this blog entry, remember that the author still felt like crap and likely should have been following her own advice about not overdoing. Thanks.)