Oh, crap.

My adrenaline starts to pump and the anticipation in my stomach rises so quickly that a little laughter escapes. But at 10:03 pm on Monday, the 22nd this is a bad time to laugh.

I yell to my boss Mark, “Tech Crunch just published!”

“What?” he yells back.

I run into his office, “Tech Crunch just published their post!” The rest of the sentence, that they published an hour early, an hour before they were supposed to, an hour before the embargo lifted and we were going to launch the site doesn’t need to be said. Hundreds of people are already on the site. Are we ready? I’m not ready! I thought we had an hour.

Around me, I feel like everyone is running and rushing. Mark and Brian meet instantly and make a split-second decision.

“We’re going live!” Brian exclaims. “Right now! Go! Go! Go!”

He sweeps through the office as excitement sweeps through our fingers. It’s bad that Tech Crunch published early, but their article is good. I’m shaking a little and smiling. Mashable emails me. They have to publish their article now too and I tell them it’s okay. We’re turning on the site now. We’re opening the doors. It’s starting. Alice.com is launching in beta.

The rest of the night is quick, blurry, surreal. When new press comes out, we yell, “CNET is up!” “Business Week!” “Financial Times!” and I throw the links onto Yammer. I refresh my screen every few minutes to watch the bar on the new customer graph rise. I work more than seventeen hours, my co-workers even more, and none of us really notice.

Some of the developers bring sleeping bags, the customer service girls bring a blow-up mattress, and the rest plan to sleep under their desks. At Alice, each employee is assigned an animal. I am a crane, which means, in part, that I’m particular. I want my own bed, so I drive home in the middle of the night.

The highway is completely empty, black and shiny. I own it. The asphalt, everything beneath and all the buildings lined up along on the side are mine. No other cars or people or lumbering trucks. I drive fast because I’m tired, and I want to sleep, and I want to get up and do it all over again.

Considering my co-workers only got two or three hours of sleep, I know they feel the same. The Alice team is more than dedicated, more than hard-working. This is the start-up life, our life.

There’s a lot of talk about balance. Some of the most popular authors preach zen-like attitudes, getting out of work, and lifestyles that are built on, well, not a whole lot. And then there are those who talk about sacrificing your health for your start-up, who talk in terms of not just passion, but obsession for your profession, and whose idea of fun is innumerable hours spent on a single idea.

Fighting balance across the fence is blur. And that is where I live. A life that should preclude me from having any sort of relationship with anybody or anything other than work, but in reality, betters those relationships. A place that makes me excited to be young and in love and working hard.

Peace, it seems, can not only be discovered in the quiet pauses of life, but also in the often forceful and uncertain flow that rushes against walls and norms and status quo.

Fancy Work.

I’ve been living la freelancing vida loca lately and enjoying the grind quite a bit. Between web copywriting gigs and generating entrepreneurship content, I’ve kept myself busy enough to feel productively sane.

I’ve also benefited from a bit of “trialing.” It’s a term endeared to consultants and employers who’ve taken on enough stringers in their lifetime to know that there’s such a thing as over-promising on a relationship that might not work out.

The same concept applies to us lowly stringers on the opposite end coming from a place where I’ve signed on to work for/with someone only to realize a few weeks into it, that it just wasn’t meant to be.

I liken trialing to boot camp for contractors. It’s like getting a scholarship to go to school and having your education paid for by a benefactor. In this case, it happens to be a potential employer and the trade-off is a week or two of intensely hard work and crunch time which either leads to landing the gig or getting your stomach punched in – figuratively.

So having been put through some trialing recently with some new clients I engaged through virtually networking my little tush off, I’ve come to realize the benefits of trialing far outweigh the cons.

• Commitment-free means fewer facial lines: Being a successful freelancer demands you try your hand at many different jobs before you can pick the ones that are right for you. This also translates to having the time available to do this which means before you commit, do yourself a favor and walk the walk. You’ll be less stressed out for it!
• Choosy freelancers choose the best gigs: Don’t be afraid to turn down something you don’t really want to do. If you can swing it financially and have enough on the backburner (even if it’s on a low flame), then respectfully decline the project, but don’t burn the contact. Your contact will respect that you were self-aware enough of your enthusiasm (or lack thereof) to let this project go, not to mention considerate enough to be upfront with them.
• Juggle freely but don’t lose focus: Be mindful of learning curves while trialing. Most of the time what on average might take you half the time once you’ve mastered the rhythm of a particular project and aren’t reinventing the wheel each time, will take you double or 3X the time in the beginning. Be patient with yourself and factor in the excess time when taking on a lot of trial gigs at once.
• Flat rates work best: I remember feeling so guilty when I charged a client an hourly rate for my first assignment and it took me twice the time it should have. I felt pressured to get it done faster so as not to charge too high while trying to put my best foot forward and make a good impression so I could land more work. Recently, when a new client approached me and suggested a flat rate for copy for the first two sites she commissioned me to work on, I was able to to take my precious time and make sure that I got the copy down pat before sending it off to the “printer.”