NaNoWriMo is Almost Over!

In fact, it ends at midnight tomorrow, and I still have 4,374 words left to be more or less exact. Worse still, my story has stalled hard core. I think this is a last minute ploy by my "inner editor" that small voice in my head that likes to tell me how much my story sucks.

Still, there are some wonderfully encouraging people out there, who are urging me ever onward. I'm going to try to listen to them because 4000 words is really nothing in the grand scheme of things. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, keep typing and best of luck to you and your characters!

Now back to the website content I'm writing for an English web design company in order to pay my bills.

Three Months as a Fulltime Freelance Writer

I reached the three month mark a few days ago, and I finally have a little time to write today. I have been so busy that I haven’t written anything for this blog in about three weeks. Month three has gone very well in terms of the amount of work that I’m doing. In general, I’m averaging thirty to fifty articles a week. Actually, I must admit, it has been a big challenge to do about fifty articles and to work about fifteen to twenty hours. This has been a month of late nights and early mornings. I’ve actually started getting up by 7 a.m. for most of September, and a couple of days a week, I get up at 6 a.m., and I go work for an hour or so before joining my husband for breakfast. I’ve found this to be an extremely productive system, though currently, I can only do it for about three days a week.

The good thing is that I definitely have enough to do, and I am making enough to pay the bills with a little extra leftover (for canning supplies mostly). However, I am still working for less money than I’d like in a few situations. I’m bracing myself for a fun conversation with Mr. Digital Picture Frame about upping my rate. However, I am currently writing for anywhere from $3 (for 300 word articles) to $10 (for 400 and 500 word articles), so that is fairly good. I know I can get higher rates eventually, but I am not entirely sure how to go about that. I’m currently having enough trouble with balancing out all of my clients’ needs.

I hope that by the end of next month or so, I will be getting better rates and not feel quite so frazzled.

Click here to see month two. 

When it Rains it Pours

Some people disagree with this statement, but when it comes to freelancing, it is most certainly true. I was explaining to a co-worker at my new part time job that I didn’t have any articles a few weeks ago. I had gone from forty-seven articles to twenty-four to one in a span of three weeks. Somehow all my clients (I have about eight regulars), who are located all over the world, (Canada, the U.S., Spain, and England) have managed to synchronize their schedules.

 

Sometimes I swear that they do this to make my life difficult. They will all want articles within days of each other. I went from having my one weekly article to getting contacted by two regulars and an older client within 48 hours of each other. Between the three of them, they want about forty-five articles. Fortunately, one is very flexible, and I’ve managed to schedule the other two around my work schedule. Then a few days later, I was contacted by two more clients in succession, and I know up to about fifty articles that need to be completed by this coming Friday.

This is only the most recent example of this freelancing concept, and I have experienced more extreme periods of drought and flood. Still, I suppose, alternating periods of feast and famine is better than starving all the time.

Weird Job of the Week

I'm thinking about making my weird job of the week posts into a fairly regular series. Here's the first one.

<><><>

This job hasn’t actually started yet. It’s a continuing job for an existing client who wants twenty-five articles a week. After much hemming and hawing (on his part) a few weeks ago, I started and completed twenty-five articles about digital photo frames—twenty-five 500 word articles on the same thing. I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog can actually imagine trying to write 12,500 words on the same topic, and a fairly limited topic at that, but it was difficult.

Being as creative as I could about this mundane topic, I managed to come up with twenty-five articles. I wrote about making these frames into personalized presents for a number of different occasions, and I wrote about using the frames commercially. I wrote about using them in your home, and how they work, and what pictures you should put on them. By the end of this job, I was sick of trying to think of different ways to describe digital frames, and I was looking forward to receiving new topics.

Well, of course, the client needed a few days to get back to me after I had submitted all of the articles. What happened to the regular work that I had been promised? Very few clients who promise me regular work are ever actually organized enough to provide it. Then, a few days later, he informed me that he had lost his credit card, and he needed to get a new one before he could pay me…

About a week and a half later, I finally got paid, but I still didn’t have any information about more work. So, I focused on other clients, and I pursued a possible part time job offer. After my first week working at my local farmer’s market, I receive a number of messages asking if I was ready for more articles (this is now a month after I first started working for this guy).

After explaining that I had taken on some extra hours at the farmer’s market because I hadn’t heard from any of my clients, and explaining that this is a holiday weekend, we finally agreed on a deadline and a new number of articles. I was a little irritated at his impatience since I had been exceedingly patient with him.

So you might be wondering about the topic for this set of articles? There’s no new topic. I have to write eighteen more articles about digital frames, and another twenty-five the week after that. Maybe I can write a series about the many different ways you can destroy a digital frame. There’s water, fire, hammers….