Comics writer Mark Waid has penned an important "Open Letter to Young Freelancers" which I think is mistitled because almost everything in it that's valid also applies to old freelancers. My esteemed colleague is right that it's key to success to do good work and also to be professional about it, which generally means meeting deadlines. Balancing those two imperatives is not easy and a lot of us err on one side or the other.
It's important, I think, to be aware of the process; to understand what damage, if any, you do to the overall product by being late if (and this is a humongous "if") you're actually late because you're making your contribution better. If you're late because you just plain weren't doing the work, that's a whole 'nother matter. If I take two more weeks than planned to finish a script, that may mean the artist has two weeks less than he planned, which may be two weeks less than he needs to do his best work. I also may screw up his life because it delays work he'd expected at a certain time and/or a paycheck he expected at a certain time.
There's one bit of advice that Mark doesn't give so this one will: If you're being treated badly in comics, maybe you ought to spend some of your time pursuing some other field. I've never met anyone who could write a good comic book who couldn't write a good something-else. I have met a few guys who wanted to be "in comics" so badly that they neglected other opportunities, thereby making themselves virtual prisoners of this field that wasn't treating them too well. One of the keys to being comfortable in any kind of gig as a freelance writer is to remember the "freelance" part and be able to walk out the door if things become intolerable.
I'm going to use the word "employers" here but when you're a freelance writer, "customers" might sometime be the more applicable noun. I've been a professional writer since June of 1969 and in all that time, I've never been without paying work for more than, oh, about six hours. A few times in there, paying work didn't pay but that's another matter. At no point in what I jokingly call my career has more than around 80% of my income come from any one employer and it's been rare that all the employers I did work for were in the same line of work. There have been times when a comic book company offered me all the work I could handle. Even then, I was also writing for TV, also writing for non-comic magazines, also writing for stand-up comedians, etc. The mix has varied over the years but it's always been a mix.
There are many reasons for this and I'm not even sure which is the most important. One is that I think it's helped the quality of the work. I learned things doing one kind of writing that I could apply to another. Another is that it's always nice to have a little insurance because you never know when the flow will suddenly stop from one source. It's financially prudent to have another flow in reserve.
And also I've found that you and your work are just plain treated better by people who don't own you. You shouldn't, except in the most extreme situations, actually threaten to take a hike…but most employers respect a guy who can. (There are employers where the opposite is true: They don't want you around if they can't own you. I don't want to work for or with those people anyway. At least for me, it never ends well.)
There are downsides to juggling multiple employers — days when I have a TV producer on Line 1 saying, "I must have that script today" and a comic book editor on Line 2 telling me the same thing. I have that at the moment which makes me wonder why I'm taking the time to write this. But it's still better than having everything riding on one professional relationship. So I think I'd better stop blogging and go make those two employers happy…