And, though I promised myself I wouldn’t, I have neglected this poor blog again.
It’s time to set up a new writing calendar. When I had just four site and a half-dozen clients, just keeping it all in my head worked fine. These days, there is just too much to keep up with.
I’ll be back.
I’m pretty much infinity plus one hours behind today, so we’ll have to keep this one kind of short. However, I amused myself while writing today at a couple of little idiosyncrasies in language that tripped me up, not because they are complicated or one of those very confusing English grammar rules, but because that they don’t necessarily come up in the proper writing context.
Before we go too far, we’ll start with a gratuitous reference to one of my article published elsewhere about Citibank ThankYou rewards. Now, moving on…
Unlike most people, I am a professional writer. That means that every day, my writing gets graded, just like when you were back in high school. My grader is not a school teacher trying to ensure that my writing is correct enough to get a passing grade on the state’s standardized writing text, but rather an editor who
a) knows just as much about correct English grammar and punctuation as any writer,
b) may very well have an advanced degree in either English or Writing,
c) probably could teach most high school English teachers a thing or two about grammar
Oh, yeah and:
d) decides whether or not the grammar I use in the writing I turn into him or her is good enough to accept my work and pay me, or that it needs to be edited and corrected before it is good enough to accept and pay me.
In other words, grammar matters to me. A lot.
That means that not only have I learned a lot about writing and grammar over the years, but I keep learning new rules and guidelines because there always seems to be another way to write something that does not fall among the rules and standards that I already know.
Long story, short – I do my best to not correct other people’s grammar no matter how terrible and I struggle each day to hit Cancel or Delete before pointing out that “your” means something that belongs to you, while “you’re” means you are.
That being said, today, I found myself on the, “Hey, wait a minute, is that right?” end of my own writing.
First came spell-check’s red squiggly underline beneath the word “triaging.” Fair enough. I’ve never looked it up. Maybe the ‘e’ is supposed to be left on the end of the word before adding the ‘ing.’ It’s unusual, but not unprecedented.
However, that spelling, “triageing” came up with a red squiggly underline as well.
That sent me to Dictionary.com which has the word triage, but nothing about making it an active verb.
From there I went to Merriam Webster’s website who had nothing for me.
And, finally, to the actual, printed, hardcover dictionary in my bookcase. It too has no record of any such word.
For well over a year now, I have been telling people, often in writing, that I was “triaging my email,” which is my way of saying desperately trying to find, and take action on, all of the important emails while sorting the remaining email into their relative levels of importance ranging from important, but not urgent, all the way down to they’ll-get-over-it, and lastly, spam.
It seems that I have been making up a word.
That’s fine for rappers and high-school girls (“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.”) but not so great for writers. Although, you can have “jackassery” when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I don’t care what Merriam, Webster, or Mrs. Jones in 4th period English say.
The Bane of My Existence
Next up, was the spell checker overload when I finished a lengthy tirade in which I, somewhat comically, continuously re-used the word, “bane.” Unfortunately, I did not use the word, “bane” at all, but rather, “bain.” Oops.
No harm, no foul, here as it wasn’t something to be professionally submitted, but it brought a smile to may face anyway, particularly because about one-half of my friends couldn’t use the word in a sentence let alone be familiar enough with it to judge the mistaken spelling.
Be that as it may, we march on. Brian Nelson is out…
I do a little bit of writing for Demand Studios as a way to fill in my freelance writing business pipeline. When I really want to just punch something out to make a few bucks in between TV shows or while waiting for friends to show up at a restaurant or coffee shop, I’ll write some of the “Short Answer” freelance writing gigs offered on the website. They only pay $3, but they are literally two minute assignments if you don’t over-reach from what you either know, or know that you can find out very quickly.
Lately, however, there haven’t been any short answer writing assignments on Demand Studios. I’ve checked by selecting the AnswerBag website as the “publisher,” which is where I understand most of the short answer questions and answers end up. I’ve also tried selecting “short answer” as the format, and just for grins, even tried searching for $3 assignments. All three screens of results showed up empty.
Maybe I’m blocked from writing those, maybe they just don’t have any writing opportunities in that category right now, or maybe I’m doing it wrong (not likely, it’s pretty simple).
Then again, maybe Demand Studios is not making any money off of those short answer articles, or maybe Google’s ranking algorithm is finally doing something to find good search results other than just matching the title tag and counting up the number of automated links programed to each article by big websites with lots of pages to point links from.
Either way, I wrote this instead of earning $6 or $9 while waiting for my friends to show up. No big deal, but if you add up the number of times I do that each month, it actually might cost me a hundred bucks or so 
I guess that I’ll live. Maybe I can start using that time to find higher paying writing gigs to send resumes to instead.
I had one of those months that almost makes you wish that you still had a day job instead.
Almost.
It all started with some business infrastructure problems in the form of an email server nightmare. I’ve always just used whoever was hosting my websites as my email provider and never thought any more about it than that. Once I had my email accounts setup in Thunderbird or another desktop email client like Zimbra, I made the terrible assumption that everything that hit my server was dutifully being passed along via IMAP or POP3.
I never bothered to re-check my POP3 settings for Gmail or my IMAP settings for other email accounts so long as email kept showing up in my email client. Unfortunately, just because some email was showing up, didn’t mean that all email was showing up. I probably lost out on some clients and had to do major damage control with some others.
Here are some of my recent published freelance writing articles at BrightHub.
Anyway, the moral of the story is to never take anything in your freelance writing business for granted. Check, double-check, and re-check.
Oh, and for your critical systems like email, you might want to consider paying a little extra for a specialized email provider with fully-skilled tech support waiting to not only help you if you notice something go wrong, but who can also proactively alert you if something might be going wrong.
Lesson learned.
Whew! Finally made it through the holidays.
As a freelancer, taking vacations can be pretty tough. You never know when I client is going to need a can’t wait, must be perfect, please, please, please, project done. However, chances are good that at least one of those will pop up during a long-planned vacation for some much-needed family time. The main exception to this semi-Murphy’s Law of professional freelance writers vacations is the time between the Thanksgiving Holiday and New Year’s Day. This stretch of time offers the freelancer a “Get out of work free,” card.
Businesses around the globe become a little bit softer about things like deadlines, contracts, and projects during the holiday season. That is because everyone else is already doing the same thing. After all, even the biggest company isn’t interested in pushing through a new, highly technical contract while their top tech contract reviewer is on a beach in Cabo.
However, this year, I may have gone a little bit too far. Having scheduled trips to visit both sides of the family out-of-state, plus a fun and relaxing vacation for the family, plus some planned “downtime” to just spend at home and both have fun and work on some household projects, there wasn’t really much room for error. Unfortunately, there was plenty of error in the form of colds going around all the family members and a baby whose colic got worse just when we had to move him out of his baby swing to sleep overnight.
Add it all up, and this freelancer is behind, WAY BEHIND for January.
The good news is that I did get some great ideas for new articles for both my own projects and for my clients as well. First up, a series for my website about parenting skills about babies and sleep. After reading through seemingly dozens of parenting books and books about getting a baby to fall asleep, I noticed that there is a BIG gap in some of the information out there. After all, not every time a baby needs to sleep is when they are going to be put down to sleep overnight. There are naps and middle of the night wakings too. Just saying that they will go away is not helpful to stressed out parents, whether they be new first-time parents, or experienced parents with a new baby.
Also, I’m looking at starting up some new websites thanks to some information I learned over the holidays. An all night reading of a certain website over Christmas weekend was particularly enlightening. Having done some further research and experiments to confirm what I read, there could be some great things in store for the professional writers at ArcticLlama, LLC this year.
Hope everyone had a great holiday! Now, get back to work
I’ve been a professional freelance writer for almost two years now. I haven’t had a “real” job in all of that time. Last holiday season most people nodded politely when I told them I was a freelance writer, or furrowed their eyebrows at me as if to ask if that was the same thing as being unemployed.
However, no one really asked much about it. In hindsight, I guess that they figured it was just some phase, or maybe just another person they knew trying (and probably failing) to start-up a small business because they got tired of the corporate world. Or, perhaps even more likely, they all figured that since my wife is a lawyer, that maybe she was supporting me and I was just dabbling in writing.
What a difference a year makes. My wife has dropped down to part-time at her job and we are planning on her quitting altogether some time this coming year. Couple that with the fact that this is the second Thanksgiving or Christmas in a row that I have given the same answer to the question, “So, what are you doing these days?” and people’s curiosity has peaked.
Follow up questions have become much more common this year.
The number one question about being a freelance writer that I get is, of course, “What is it that you write?”
This question, which used to only come from close family and friends, is the reason I started this little blog in the first place. I figured I could point people to this webpage if they were truly curious, and not just being polite. From here, they could follow whatever links they liked to my various writings around the web. It is less “business-y” than my official freelance writing business website, and less particular than my official freelance writing samples webpage.
The truth is, that most people are looking for an answer like, books, magazine articles, or even advertisements – something along the lines of, “You know that radio commercial for the Denver Zoo…” Ironically, I don’t really write any of that.
It turns out that I found clients for my freelance writing business fast and easy on the Internet. Since then I’ve earned plenty of money without pounding the sidewalk or banging the phones to find new “in real life” clients, so I’ve never really tried.
What that means, however, is that my answer about what I do leaves most people confused.
“Oh, you mean you build websites?” — Well, not complicated ones, but I do write content for big well-known websites. [More puzzled looks]
The major difficulty lies in the same place that it does when trying to find new freelance writing clients. If you have never worked with a freelance writer on a project before, you just aren’t familiar with how it works. Even the most astute can only get so far as to assume that my job is to do the writing when no one else has the time.
In the end, I don’t really try too hard to explain anymore exactly what value I provide as a freelance writer and instead just direct the conversation to things people can more readily understand, like I work from home out of a home office and my commute happens in my flannel pants. This immediately turns the conversation away from what I do and how I do it, to how lucky I am, and then, inevitably, how they should try it sometime.
Sigh.
By the way, if you want to check out some of my not-so-business writing that I get to crank out for fun and profit (sometimes) you can look at some of the Hubs published under HubLlama at HubPages.com
Freelance Writing Blog
