Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

I have been writing about Warcraft for most of the last year – everything you can imagine in that game, I’ve written about it. Leveling guides, class guides, gold guides, pvp guides, articles, website content….everything. But, now we’ve got a new game that just hit in Warhammer Online and I’m wondering how long it will take until I write everything there is to know about that game…a couple months? A year? 

Of course, there are already a ton of guides out there and the thing has only been out for 6 days. I stumbled across a Warhammer Online guide at TheWarhammerGuide.com – wow, real original for a name, right? And that was before I looked at the AdWords listings and saw the other half dozen or so that are out there. Of course, there will be more and there will be new things to write about. Here’s to another game that I have minimal interest helping to pay my bills.

Freelancing

Running a business is a trust game – if someone doesn’t trust you, they sure as heck are not interested in giving you their money for your products or services. Would you go into an electronics store where every item was sold out of box for retail price? Probably not. But, building trust offline is entirely different from doing it online – you don’t have a store front to put a face to your business. You have a website – and websites are notoriously bad at conveying any kind of emotion or human face of your business. That’s why you hear constant reminders to do the little things. Put peoples’ pictures on your site, write a blog in a casual tone and send out personal emails to stay on a friendly tone with people.

It’s all part of the way in which people deal think about what they’re going to buy. So, what does this all have to do with the post title, or freelance writing for that matter? When you start talking about freelancers, you have a very interesting dilemma.

First. freelancers are by nature floaters. They go from project to project building reputation and using that reputation to get bigger, better projects. They don’t have a solid location or image to cling to – they are amorphous – it’s how they survive. 

But, people don’t trust the amorphous. They want stability, experience, and quality all at once. So, how do you convey those qualities without actually opening a store front or plopping down a few thousand dollars on websites, advertising and everything else a good “stable” business needs. 

You start by creating the “image” of a stable business. A few months ago, I worked on a project for a client that needed a book about local search. I create a fake plumber and added his name to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Live Local, and a half dozen yellow page and directory sites so I could take snapshots of everything. Of course, you need a phone number to verify those listings and I had to use one I could answer. Suffice it to say that in the three days before I turned all of those accounts off, I received 54 phone calls for my imaginary plumber all based on the illusion of a stable business. People see an address and a profile that appears in multiple locations and they assume you are worth trusting. 

Toss up a Google Maps location, add yourself to local directories, and put as many business references as you can up online and you will get more business – I can almost guarantee that. If someone sees “Joe’s Writing Services” and Google’s the name to find 14 listings in YellowPages, Yahoo! Local, and Citysearch among many others, they assume you’re legit…even though you wrote them all yourself. 

Quality writing doesn’t always get the job done for freelancers in these economic times, so you’ve got to think outside the box – build up your profile across the next in multiple niches and be where your potential clients will look for you.

Freelance Lifestyle business planning, freelance writing, growing business, make money online

It is inevitable when you freelance – eventually, you look at all that stuff you’re working on day in and day out and wonder, “why can’t I do that?” The question itself is not flawed, but the actual work that goes into finding out if you can in fact do those things is almost never as minimal as you expect. 

Recently, I decided to take a stab at working on a few side projects in my increasingly limited spare time to take advantage of what I saw as ripe markets and try to hit up a few possible bonus opportunities. The results have yet to truly make themselves known but I have noticed that I am working a heck of a lot more and getting just a hair less sleep in the process. 

I suppose the title of this post is a bit misleading as I’m not going to lay out the outline of starting on a side project or anything like that – rather I’m just going to say: it’s fun to try, but don’t over do it. Burn yourself out on work you don’t get paid for and it’s that much harder to do the real stuff.

Freelancing

Every now and then when you’re a full time writer – and especially when you’ve started your own writing business, things happen that make it to where you have to work entirely too much in any given week. This is just such a week – there are no specific reasons why it happens. Maybe I want to take a vacation soon or maybe I bid on too many projects. Maybe I’m just trying to catch up on bills – whatever the reason, it happens about every month or so for at least one week and while it may be balanced out by those slow weeks, that’s never the first thing on my mind.

There are usually at least two or three days in that particular week where I work from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. Those days especially disappoint. I mean, who wants to work that much? I sure as heck don’t. It’s too much, but then again, who gets the option of taking days off at will? Not too many people at this point in life. It’s a great job no matter how you look at it – the only thing you have to remember is that there are always downsides such as the extra time that will get thrown out every now and then when the freelancing week from hell rears its ugly head and plops your butt squarely in a chair or on the couch for hours at a time.

Freelancing freelance writing, Freelancing, make money at home, work online

It’s always bittersweet when the days wind down. Final sunny days at the ballpark and all. If only this team were a little better

Free Time baseball

I never saw her again.

At first, it was sport – a way to spend my evenings that would endlessly vex my wealthy progenitors. But, as time passed, I started to see something more in it – an exciting means by which I was able to actually do something. I started to wonder where these poor wretched fools were going when I sent them away, what they were doing after they left the Upper City for their first and likely last visit the rich quarters of the city. It was in this way that I kept myself occupied and consistently busy each evening. During the days I began to grow lonelier as the young men and women with whom I had spent my childhood pretending to be the rich barons and baronesses of the city that many of us would one day be, had started to look at me as though I was carrying the same diseases and scratching at the same sores they did. 

Needless to say, I grew reclusive and rumors began to fly. My maids and servants would bring word of what the other nobles were saying about me – that I was swollen with child, that I had killed a suitor in a blind rage, that I had begun to come down with the vapors and hardly knew my own name. They amused me at first, but soon they began to get under my skin as my reputation that I had never quite cared about started to fade away. 

My parents begged of me to see a doctor, to visit the country, to leave the city, and to most of all stop spending my time seeing the rabble with their little trinkets. There was a man who claimed he could turn salt water into drinking water with a wire plugged into a small machine with multiple turning cogs. Another man came bearing the portrait of a woman he claimed had been the Queen of the Eastern reaches before the world had been formed. She looked like my mother. 

I saw what must have been two hundred of these men and women – at least five every evening for more than a month – before he arrived. The moment he walked into the room, I knew that he had something special in his hands, that he was what I had been waiting for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. 

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, online noveling

I get a lot of questions about what exactly I “do” for a living. The truth is that when someone asks me that question there are a lot of possible answers. I could simply say “I’m a writer” or I could elaborate and explain that I own a freelance copy writing business or that I do articles for the web. Any way you look at it, there isn’t really an all inclusive answer. If I said “freelance writer” people would ask me what kind of freelance writing I do. They would say, “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and of course the immediate answer is no. I write articles for digital products and rework website content for Canadian businesses. If someone had actually read something I had written by chance, I’d probably have more questions for them than they’d have for me.

The other day for example, I was talking to one of my girlfriend’s cousins and she asked me if I was writing anythign interesting. As often happens, I was thrown off by the question. I don’t really think of my work in terms of “interesting” or not. It’s not that it is never interesting. It’s just that most of the time that’s not the important part – the important part is that it will convert to a higher pay:work ratio than the last project. I know it sounds crass, but most freelancers work like this. Even the hoighty toighty magazine and newspaper writers that write for the “love of it” are really just thinking of how much they can get done in a short amount of time and pay their bills. It’s the biggest irony of trying to make money with any form of artistic endeavor (and I know I’m stretching the definition of artistic when I use it to talk about my freelance projects), but it’s the real truth. 

I have a partner in all this jumbled writing stuff that does a much better job of describing what he does than I do. He can tell a funny story about it or describe something ridiculously mundane in a humorous way and make people interested. I can’t even get myself interested half the time. Of course, I am by no means complaining. I love my job. I work the projects I choose, the hours I choose and can take off whenever I feel like it. I work on my couch, watching baseball or at a coffee shop while listening to Radiohead. I get more freedom working alone than I could ever have dreamed of anywhere else, but I do loathe those conversations – what do I do? I write stuff…let’s keep it at that.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, writing for money

Admittedly, I don’t really ever have any idea what to write about. It used to be that I would keep a Google Reader account open while trying to blog that I would take from liberally. I would then regurgitate a lot of content back to here that I read elsewhere just to fill in posts. To that end, I haven’t really posted all that much of late (22 total this year), so I suppose I don’t really need to do that anymore. Anyways, enough self-reflection on why I do or do not post. I’m really just looking for something better to do with my evenings that play guitar hero and rock band for two or three hours. Fun…undoubtedly. Productive…rarely.

Free Time blogging, topics

I know it’s a bit sparse but I’m incredibly tired of all the back and forth over nothing. Anyone remember how Obama mentioned actual issues in his nomination speech? Probably not, because McCain announced his horrible VP pick the next day. When is the first debate already?

Free Time election 2008