The Unemployed Writer

Battered and bruised and soaking wet up to his waist, Brutus didn’t have the luxury of an excuse for being in the Guard tunnels. It didn’t matter that he was on a case or that he had been one of the most highly decorated members of the City Guard in his day. In fact, those two things would probably get him in even more trouble if the guard who had started chasing him recognized his face from the images posted throughout the various parts of the city where Brutus had been banned.

It had happened five years previously, when Brutus Weaver and Reggie Hunter had been on a particularly tough pair of cases. The two – Bob and Jim as the rest of the Guard liked to call them (alluding to their common Under City upbringing) – had taken on a pair of lower profile cases in the interim as there hadn’t been any murders, kidnappings or burglaries in the previous three weeks to keep them busy. The cases though, one a missing herd of steer and the other a battery against a non-talking member of the royal family, were not low profile in that no one cared (far from it), but they were not the usual death and destruction cases that the pair were used to and things were not going well.

Having split the two cases up, the pair were not having any luck and after ten days of minimal leads and no progress they had decided to join forces and work together on the battery case. The missing herd of steer was important (they belonged to a minor noble) but the beating of the twelfth in line to the throne was the case they were being ridden on for not having solved yet.

It had happened during a Revelry on a Fifth Day celebration. Every week, the young and rich would take the streets and Fourth and Fifth Day to spend what they could find and drink what they could hold in a seemingly endless series of Revelry’s (because the word party was apparently too low class to be used). Brutus had been stuck on dozens of cases related to drunken brawls, late night trysts gone wrong, and poorly handled returns home by Revelry goers when he was on his way up in the ranks of the Guard and the only reason they were stuck with this particular case was because it was someone more important than normal.

Barren Willington Morris’s son to be exact – the Baron being the fourth youngest brother of the King, making young Walter the nephew of the King. He had been stumbling from the last of a series of Revelries toward his carriage, parked innocuously across the street when a trio of thugs had run out of the alleyway and attacked him, beating him repeatedly upside the head with socks jammed with something hard and metallic – the bruises were the shapes of brackets and hinges, likely stolen from the scrap heap behind a carpenter’s shop.

When they were done, they ran away, their faces hidden, and Walter laid in the street for the better part of a half hour before the carriage driver woke and wondered where he had gotten off to. The kid was okay – he’d gotten a broken nose, a pair of bruised ribs and a dislocated shoulder out of it, but the King and his brother were none too happy and the Guard had called dozens of men out on their days off and off of reserve to see to the matter. 

chatfielda My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, My Fiction

It’s been a while since any updates were posted here and for good reason. I’m buuuusy. Getting married in two months, trying to keep the whole business thing on even kiel, and working on a dozen ideas at once (don’t recommend it). Check out some recent posts over at my other blog though as well as my twitter feeds:

http://www.seattlefreelance.com/blog

http://twitter.com/chatfielda

http://twitter.com/seattlefreelanc

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The space between each house was minimal at best, but it did bear the benefit of having no windows as men and women like this had no desire to look into the home of their neighbor. Brutus writhed his way into the space and started shimmying down the alley way, trying to remember which street actually connected to the central district where the royals would be living. He was not sure where Sarina would actually have her abode though so he would first need to find out where she lived. At first he assumed it would be in the inner city, but with a few more moments to consider, it could easily be one of the homes next to where he was standing. Her parents were the richest in the city, but they were still just outer royalty and a merchant.

Brutus considered for a few more moments, drawing upon what had once been an encyclopedic knowledge of the Upper City aristocracy. He finally decided that regardless of how they felt about merchants, even Willemshire’s nobility would allow someone with as much money with Sarina’s father to live within the richer quarters of the Upper City.

He did a quiet loop back out of the back end of the alley and almost screamed in pain when he kicked a can lying on the curb – it shouldn’t have been there. The sanitation in the Upper City was unparalleled, constantly maintained to ensure the utmost cleanliness. It was not like them to miss even a can – it must have just been dropped there. Instinctually, Brutus jumped back into the shadows of the alley just as a man coughed from above, hanging his half drunken, half naked torso out of the third story balcony of some lonely widow’s much too large house. Brutus cursed softly and winced again as he leaned back against the brick of the alley way and the muscles in his body that had only a few hours before been battered and bruised called out in pain.

Waiting in the sliver of darkened alley as he was, Brutus had a few minutes to think things through, to consider what had happened to him already that day. First, he had taken on a case solely because he needed the money and without thinking about what it was the woman in the slick dress had needed from him. That wasn’t like him at all. It was almost too much unlike him. Second, he had been beaten over the head and then battered by Under City goons twice within 24 hours. Third, he had gotten a nice old merchant killed simply by talking to him a little too long about something he wasn’t supposed to know about.

This was not the kind of case Brutus liked to take and it was already giving him a pretty good idea of just how much trouble he was probably going to run into before he got anywhere meaningful with it. Shit, right now he was crouched into a bruised up ball in the side alley of the Upper City where City Guard patrolled four times each hour, on the quarter hour. One false move and he’d be strung up in the central square for everyone within a two mile radius to walk by and poke sticks at. This was not his idea of a good time and he was already running dangerously low on options.

After what seemed an eternity, Brutus edged his head out from the shadows and looked up. The window had been closed and the candle light extinguished. He was free to move and he’d better do it quickly because he hadn’t seen or heard a guard in almost ten minutes – they would be by any time now on their quarterly rounds and if Brutus wasn’t out of the way by then, his return trip would be all too short indeed.

Running his hand over a two day layer of stubble (damn, he kept forgetting to shave) and shuffling as quietly as he could, he stumbled out into the street and up around the bend, into the inside ring of the city. Within seconds he was able to find the old passage ways he’d used when he was in the guard, what looked like basement entrances with elaborate hand locks on them built into one in every six houses on the inner ring of homes. The guard was not appreciated walking around the Inner City at night – it made the nobles uncomfortable, so one of the Guard Captains had installed a series of tunnels under the city about a hundred years or so ago so that rounds could still be made in accordance with the law without routinely angering the men and women who the Guard was trying to protect. It was silly and Brutus had routinely completely about having to climb underground to protect the ingrate slobs who slept so comfortably above them when he was a patrolman.

Rubbing his hair with a sweaty palm and slipping down the moldy stairway into the tunnels below, he touched down none-too-gently and immediately slipped into a nook he somehow half remembered. The tunnels were not lit – it was up to Guard members to bring their own torches – and so Brutus was going to have to operate on memory alone – something his alcohol addled brain was none too keen on – to get to where he needed to be.

Running his hands along the walls and finding the notched he remembered – small pinky sized square notches that told him where to turn and which direction he was walking – he started down the tunnel, trying hard not to step into the often times puddle-damp floor between him and the next stairway. He carefully picked his way along, trying hard not to stumble with his bad leg and hoping that he could avoid any guards.

A sudden splash as someone dropped down into the light pool followed by a shout behind him told Brutus that he wasn’t about to be so lucky this evening. “Hey, you! What are you doing down here?!”

Brutus bit the inside of his cheek and made the only choice he had – he ran.

chatfielda Freelancing blog novel, Brutus weaver

One of the number one things I get asked by people wondering how I got involved in the copywriting field is what I studied in College to get here. To be fair, I’ll admit up front that I was a Creative Writing Major with a focus in fiction and exposition. I wrote a lot and I have a degree to back it all up. It doesn’t really support my argument that you don’t need any formal training to do what I’m doing, but let’s just forget for a moment that degree and take a closer look at the things you really need to be effective as a copywriter. These are only a few of the things that go into writing. I have a few more that I’ll add in future posts. 

A Keen Eye for Language

While I won’t say that you need any kind of formal training to be a writer online, I will say that you need a keen eye for what makes language work and how an English sentence is formed. If you don’t read very often, haven’t written anything since high school and often have a hard time writing the memos on your checks, this job might be a bit hard for you.

But, even then don’t let it get you down. To develop a keen eye for the language, you need only to spend a bit of time understanding how sentences work, how words flow together and what is attractive to the human eye. It might not seem like it, but words are just as visually pleasing as a picture of the sunset or the vase your nephew made for you.

One of the number one things I tell people to do when they start writing for the first time is to read their first couple of articles out loud. This was an exercise I learned in Middle School and it quickly taught me to listen for things as I write. If you practice enough, you don’t have to read outloud anymore and your brain will start recognizing patterns that are effective without having to hear them. We’ll go into a bit more detail on how online copy needs to be structured for the Internet reader later, but things like cadence, white space, sentence length, word choice, and use of punctuation are all vital aspects of the flow of language that you’ll need to master.

Typing Skills

This is just plain simple and is something that anyone can improve upon very quickly. But, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to type quickly. Not only must you type quickly, you must type accurately, and consistently. In any given day, I might type between 8,000 and 15,000 words. That amount of text will take me between two and a half and six hours of hard typing. It might seem like a lot, but you’ll build up to it over time. When I first started, I might be lucky to write up 4,000 words in a day and 1,500 words an hour.

Not only do your fingers learn to start keeping pace, your brain will start learning how to develop thoughts and put them into position as you write. I’ll discuss this more later but it all comes down to practice, practice, practice. Most of what you learn and become better at in this job is intangible. But, trust me when I say that if you practice you will get better.

Ability to Focus and Self Motivate

If you want to work at home and write for a living, you need to be able to focus on what you are doing and above and beyond anything else, you need to be able to self motivate yourself. You cannot be effective at writing for a living if you spend your time watching the Simpsons or walking your dog, or doing chores around the house during your allotted work hours.

It’s hard to hear that because half of the allure of working at home is having the freedom to take breaks, adjust your schedule and move around at will rather than being stuck in an office for 8 hours a day every day. But, especially when you get started, you need to be able to maintain a steady schedule. The easier you make it for yourself to slack off, the harder it will be to get up to a point where you’re doing a job and not trying out a new hobby.

For the first six months I always recommend setting aside incrementally larger amounts of time every day. This is vital because if you start out trying to work 8 hours a day, you’ll burn out quickly, especially when learning. However, if you start out with 2 or 3 hours a day in the first week and build up to 8 hours a day by the fifth or sixth week, your mind and your body will be working full time before you know it.

Ultimately, this is the kind of job that you can do for 4-5 hours a day, 4-5 days a week and make $40,000 a year doing, but it is going to take anywhere up to a year to get to that point. It takes time to get higher paying jobs; it takes time to build up your stamina in typing (and thinking that much) and it takes time to build up your resolve enough to spend that much time working in your own home every day. 

chatfielda Freelancing freelance writing, make money online, writing for money

A blog is a great tool for prospective online writers because it is free, easy, and great practice. The number one thing you can do for yourself when attempting to get into a freelancing career is write regularly. That means you need to find something to write about (or someone to pay you).

Since thinking of things to write out of thin air is not the easiest thing in the world and because you’re not going to be able to get people to pay you just yet (we’re still assuming you have no references), blogging is your best bet. Here are a few things that blogging does for a prospective writer:

Builds a Portfolio

When you first start out, you have absolutely nothing to work with. You won’t have any work to draw upon except for some old high school or college papers and if you’re older, you may not have written anything in years. A blog addresses these things by providing you with an outlet to build a portfolio. For this reason, you need to watch what you write about (no profanity and always write with the idea that a potential client might read it someday), and make sure to write constantly – if you write a post a day for three months you’ll have 90 posts to draw from for inspiration and samples later on.

Creates an Audience

When you blog regularly, people will eventually start to read what you write. They will stumble upon your blog through search engines, blog databases, and readers and will either be intrigued or bored by what you say. Either way, their feedback will help you develop your writing style and engage an active audience about your writing.

Develops a Style

If you have not been writing for a few years, blogging can be an invaluable tool to help reestablish your writing style. Many people don’t spend much time writing in their careers and if they do it’s too dry to count as a style. Writing blog posts and articles will require a certain flare and style that will become uniquely yours.

Fine Tunes Grammar and Spelling

If you haven’t been writing or even if you have and haven’t had to sell or submit anything for review, fine tuning your fundamentals is an essential part of the process. Learning the ins and outs of grammar and spelling will save you a ton of time and energy when you start submitting your work for money.

Develops Contacts

Having connections is a huge part of being a successful freelance writer. Clients will recommend you to other clients, give you repeat work and help you find new clients if you develop a working relationship with them early. Start taking down email addresses, developing contacts and getting to know people online through your blog – you never know when those contacts will come in handy.

Builds Up Typing Speed and Efficiency

By getting yourself to type a certain amount of text every day you will quickly build up a more efficient, higher quality typing speed and efficiency that will allow you to make more money, turn around projects faster and maintain higher quality that will make clients happier. Less edits and fast turnaround equals lots of repeat business and the ability to ask for higher rates.

chatfielda Freelancing freelance tips, freelance writing, make money online

The Upper City hadn’t changed much in the years since Brutus had been all but exiled from it. The fountains were still shiny enough to scare the birds and the cobblestones were careful done up to look rustic and old when they were replaced every six months like clockwork. Where the Under City always strove to downplay how poor its citizens were, the Upper City did the opposite, creating visions of opulence at every turn. There were no merchants or peddlers of any kind – they had been relegated entirely to the Merchant Quarter decades before and had not returned to the Upper City since – they were occasionally allowed in to see a rich patron or to deal an item upon invitation, but they could not solicit sales in the Upper City or they risked being jailed. Brutus could still remember the first merchant he had jailed when he was a recruit – it was a teenage boy just barely starting his career. He had gotten a cartload of Ice Pears from the North and had assumed the delicacies would sell better among the royals in the Upper City. He hadn’t talked to more than two men and women before he was spotted and arrested. His eyes had been as wide as saucers, scared out of his skull that the stories about the Dungeons were true. Brutus had just shaken his head – he had never seen the dungeons and to be frank wasn’t sure if the rumors were true or not, but he didn’t want to give the boy false hope.
The fact that someone like Sarina’s father had made it in the Upper City was shocking enough. Brutus had seen it a few times of course –a rich merchant is often capable of wooing the last daughter of some rich noble or another merely because of the extra resources and the time to devote. If you have enough money, even royalty will look the other way from your workman’s hands. The merchants rarely fit in though when they arrived. He wondered if McConnell had managed to fit in with the Willemshire elite. He doubted it, but then again, he didn’t want to risk finding out by running into the man. He was in the Upper City for one reason alone. He needed to talk to Sarina.
Brutus tried his hardest to keep from limping too stiffly. The story may have worked on the gate guards but if he pushed his luck, he would soon enough be face to face with a Constable or worse, a Guard Captain. Either would likely find his story wanting and boot him from the city – or worse, they might recognize him and give him a first hand chance to see what the dungeons were really like.
So, he immediately slunk between two narrow row houses. The Upper City was designed similar to how the entirety of Willemshire was laid out, in concentric rings. In the middle was the palace where the King and his family lived along with a few dozen advisers, servants and the occasional outside family member in the King’s good grace. Directly around the King’s Palace were the homes of the highest dignitaries in the land – the Dukes, Earls, and Counts that didn’t have anything to see to outside the city. Most of them did not considering their lack of land but even if they had, they would probably find a good reason to stay in the city and remain busy, if only to stay appraised of the local goings on.
Outside royalty were the homes of especially rich relatives, elevated merchants, and just about anyone that claimed royal lineage but couldn’t claim it but with the coins in their purse. This was a vast majority of the Upper City and their homes were not much nicer than the buildings in the Merchant Quarter. Squared together into long, three story rows, the homes had a short, two span yard in the front with a black steel gate blockading the sidewalk from the entrance. Each gate had a keylock on it to keep out anyone that did not belong. The houses would stretch about a full block back from the street, in a narrow jut to the middle of the double block. Houses were often three to four times as long as they were wide and were stacked upon each other one after another, wrapping around the avenue and toward the royal palace in spiraling circle.

chatfielda Freelancing blog novel, Brutus weaver

I’ve started working on a book about becoming an online copywriter so I figured I’d start posting snippets of it here every couple of days to see how people like it. Here’s the first posting:
 

chatfielda Freelancing freelance book

The old merchant had been thrown through the front window of his shop, the window shattered in the middle and dozens of cogs and wheels lay littered throughout the snow – their bits and pieces carving out small divots in the mud off the curb of the street. His guards were nowhere to be seen, but Brutus had a feeling that they were probably no better off inside the shop. Dozens of men were standing around the dead merchant in shock. They all knew exactly who was laying dead in the street and while a small giddiness probably rose in the back of the throats of many of them at the death of a rival, fear must have permeated most of them as well. Cribbly was a powerful man – probably one of the five most powerful in the city after only Ausmasann and the King and a couple in the city guard who few knew the names of.

Brutus turned immediately and left. Was it the same men who had come to see Brutus before? It was unlikely that he Ausmasann would be so brazen – at least not openly. He began to wonder if it was not Ausmasann at all who had threatened Brutus’s life but someone who had hired the gang leader. But then, who was powerful enough to hold sway over the essential leader of the Under City. Brutus pondered these questions as he weedled his way through the streets back toward the Upper City gate. It was more imperative than ever that he made it through now. He needed to know what the hell was going on.

Almost without thinking, he bumped into a merchant wearing a rich suit of royal purple – ruffled cuffs and a pompous feathered hat on the back of his head. He was clearly distracted and did not notice Brutus coming and barely noticed him bump into him, or him nabbing the blue pass that had been sticking slightly from the Merchant’s wallet in his side satchel. The man was clearly not from the city, had just received his pass and would not be recognized by the guard. Brutus cursed as he stepped crookedly on his ankle on a chipped cobblestone. It might just work…if he could survive the walk a bit longer.

In five minutes, Brutus had managed to straighten himself up to look somewhat decent, decided on a good story and had disheveled his hair a bit more to ensure his face could not be recognized. A quick glance in a shop window revealed that he would probably make it just fine but he wiped a bit of mud under his eyes just to be sure.

He stumbled from around the corner and directly into the line of sight of the guards. He held up his blue pass and made sure to stumble even more than he already was.

“Whoa…whoa, state your name.” One of the three guards stepped forward, his massive forehead and even more massive axe making it apparent that he would probably always be on gate duty. He looked confused already.

Reaching deep into his almost twenty year old training, Brutus called up as good of a Freulian accent as he could muster. The southern nations of the continent were well known for their flamboyant, often times churlish accents and men – the women of Willemshire swooned for them and the men were hard pressed not to punch them on sight. “Oh my, it was horrific. It was awful. The humanity of it all. I must be through. I must see my patron immediately.”

“Oy, what happened to you then?”A second guard had stepped forward, this one wearing the rank badge of a sergeant. He was the leader of the three and had probably seen a bit more time at the gate than the others. It was him that Brutus needed to convince.

“O’er at Cribbly Steelweavel’s shop – a horrific murder. Bodies are everywhere and I just barely escaped. Brutus was playing the odds that the news of Cribbly’s death had not yet reached the guards. My name is Francois Francisco. I have just arrived in Willemshire and had yet to sell my wares. I was set to meet with Cribbly this morning and barely escaped with my life. The assailants were giants, horrific men.”

“A Murder you say!” The guard captain was shocked. Brutus suppressed a smile. This was going perfectly.

“A vicious murder. Carnage everywhere. I must say I barely suppressed my tea from this afternoon. I cannot remember the last time I have been so shaken. I must see my patron.”

“You do not look like a merchant…” the guard captain stated, not forecefully, but offhandedly. He was clearly distracted. A second later, he had waved off the third guard to check on Cribbly’s, to see what had happened.

“My clothes were rent and torn by the attackers. My saving grace was the appearance of a City Guard at the last moment. He scared them away and I was able to escape. I took a set of clothing from Cribbly’s shop, the first thing I could find – it is barely decent, but it will have to do until I can see my patron.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Sarina McConnell.” Brutus held his breath, playing a hunch here and hoping that it worked.

The guard captain looked more closely at the blue pass. They still hadn’t gotten around to listing patronage and sponsorship information for foreign traders on the passes and he was more than a little grateful for that.

A moment later, an out of breath city guard member appeared around the corner and nodded his head emphatically. The guard captain swore under his breath, “You go through. I need to see to this.”

The gates were cracked and Brutus stumbled through them for added emphasis, making sure to play up the clear and apparent damage done to his leg. As much as he wanted to collapse in relief, he knew he could not just yet. He had a certain royal patron to see – there were some serious questions to be asked. 

chatfielda Freelancing

The Upper City hadn’t changed much in the last six years. The only entrance to the gilded inner city – the core of the king’s power – was the sixty foot marble staircase located in the center of the merchant district. The massive portcullis gates sitting about twelve feet in front of the stairs kept anyone from the Under City from entering. The merchants more or less had a free pass to enter and leave as they please but it still required a blue mark from the City Guard to get through. It would not do to have a merchant with negative views of the Upper City getting into the King’s Palace at will.

Something in the back of Brutus’s head remembered part of Sarina’s story. How had she managed to get men and women from the Under City into her home to present things to her if the gates were up. Had she instructed them to let anyone in asking for her? Would the guard even do such a thing? He didn’t know any longer. Six years was a long time in Upper City Politics. Willemshire was the capitol of a very small nation but it had dozens of royals – the aftermath of the first King Willem trying to expand his influence – awarding fiefdoms and titles to anyone that would come to live in the city and bow before him. A handful of royals didn’t technically own any land – rather they were Dukes of streets and Barons of gutters within the cities – contrived titles to give them more power than they technically ever had. It was amusing to a man like Brutus who had been born on a farm outside the city and had only spent time in Willemshire as a result of his high test scores to enter the Royal Guard Academy. He had ended up in the City Guard only after a few poor decisions with the sons and daughters of royals in the Academy.

While it was probably rather unlikely that anyone was going to have forgotten Brutus’s face if he was to go through the main gates, he didn’t have much of a choice. Now, he just needed to figure out how to get through. He had the benefit of a swollen face and a bloodied chin – the problem of course was that he had a swollen face and a bloodied chin. The guards given gate duty weren’t bright but they knew when to draw lines. It probably wouldn’t work to try and get through this way without a plan.

Instead of bursting through the gate without a plan, Brutus decided to return to Cribbly’s shop – the old man would have a way to get him through the gate. The thugs may have beaten him senseless, but they hadn’t robbed him – so he still had the coin on him that Sarina had given him – at least 125 coin still in his jacket. Another 350 was buried behind his woodstove back home and the rest was either in his belly or in the whisky bottle laying on the floor beneath his palate back home.

It took him longer than expected to get from the gate to Cribbly’s shop. The streets were more crowded than normal for as early as it was. Men and women were milling about while most of the shops still hadn’t been opened. He couldn’t see ahead very far – his left eye continuing to swell, now blocking most of his vision on that side – but something clearly had them around.

It didn’t take long for him to find out what it was – laying in the street face down, his neck twisted at an impossible angle and his clothes torn around his chest was Cribbly. 

chatfielda Freelancing

He limped back to the table where he had dropped the unopened package with the Inscription copies and found it missing. The desk was pulled sideways, probably from when they burst into the room and he checked behind it. Heaving a sigh of relief, he fished a partially torn and muddied package, complete with a swarm of fire ants on it, out from behind the desk and dropped it down on his bed. He tore open the wrapping and scanned the first inscription, a vivid image of the crime scene Sarina had described.

The man she had originally described to him was nowhere to be seen. In his place was the crumpled remains of a human body. The body had been carved into a dozen different pieces but still somehow left in one solid whole chunk – a marked part of the Rituals. The eyes had been removed and his scars had all been split open with a surgeon’s precision. The right side of his scalp was missing, his limbs were splayed in a cross with chains wrapped around each ankle and wrist, pulled taught so that bones were sticking out at the elbows and knees – in at least one case bursting through the skin.

Brutus pulled the second inscription out. There should have only been one inscription of each shot. But, the package contained two of each – for a total of eight inscriptions. Usually, the magii would only do a single inscription and then have it verified before printing. There were two completely different sets here and each one had slightly different details in it.

Whereas the first set had the bright red circles of the Rituals littered across the skin of the dead man, the second did not show those circles. In fact, the second still contained the amulet Sarina had described and her promissory note was still held in the man’s right hand. He had been altered. Whomever had found his body had changed the scene to make it look like he was killed by the Salmites. It was not a ritual killing – the man had been tortured to death. Whether it was by the Salmites or not did not matter. How Steadman had gotten the original inscriptions was a mystery in itself. Usually the magii would not have let something like this remain in existence. It was embarrassing for them.

Brutus tossed the pile of inscriptions down on his bed along with the notice from Ausmasann. It was a red letter day already – he had a murdered blackmailer, an angry gang boss, someone impersonating his dead partner, and one hell of a bloody headache. Shaking his head at first gently and then more viciously, he almost reached for the second whiskey bottle he’d bought the night before. Instead, he grabbed his jacket, folded up the inscriptions and stuffed them in his inner pocket. Trying to wipe as much blood as he could from his face, he straightened up, took a deep breath and made a decision that he knew he was going to regret. There wasn’t much of a choice any more though – things had just gotten a whole lot messier. 

chatfielda Freelancing