I find myself writing a diary entry every night that is somewhere between three hundred to five hundred words. Strangely that comes easier than the posts I manage to write on this site, as I feel must be more professional. This is the gateway to my future career hopefully, although my twitter feed somehow comes up in the top results on Google. I find myself inspired by almost anything and everything and focusing on the task at hand can be very difficult. I pour my hear out in my writing whether it be an article type post for IGN or a short story based on some kind of post-apocalyptic world.
Where I am going with this is I have found it exceptionally hard to simply choose a freelance project that feels worth doing. All of them want masses of articles, from fifty to one hundred, and they would like them for anywhere from twenty cents to seventy five cents a piece. The hardest part is being able to let go of my personal passions and just write whatever they want me to write. Kind of makes me feel like a mercenary, good enough to help but the bad guys are the ones paying! There have been some articles that have seemed interesting but in freelance you put in your bid (essentially undercutting the competition) and then seeing if you get snatched up. Imagine an eBay for writers, where the bids keep going down, until eventually someone is almost paying to write the article for the company they won the bid on. It’s a harsh world, but I suppose you need to start somewhere.
Lucky for me my blog at IGN is getting more notice, more people are viewing it and random people who aren’t a friend of a friend. The more notice I receive the better it is. I once read an article that said many companies these days will actually Google a prospective employee, especially when it comes to jobs in the media or design and development. You must demonstrate consistent passion and knowledge of your particular field and sell yourself every single day. As a writer you are just as much your product as your story is. No one gets rich over night, not in this field. They work at it, slave at it and they perfect their craft. As hard as it has been and as mentally draining as it can be, I have been loving writing every day.
The book I mentioned in my last post, Elements of Style, is a general knowledge book I believe everyone should have. It’s a little over seventy pages and that is all it needs to be. Short, concise and straight to the point. The new book I’ve started on is a Scriptwriting book that probably should have learned from Elements of Style. If I remove much of the wordiness and meaningless sentences, I find that so far this Scriptwriting book has taught me nothing. Not even a review of topics I already knew. Just nothing. Which is fantastic, I give it another two chapters before I turn to Scriptwriting For Dummies. At least I figure that one should be dumbed down already!
My short story will be posted tomorrow regardless of it’s state of edit, and I will begin the actual plans for my projects next week. Also I will be submitting a guest review for a friend’s website on the video game Fallout: New Vegas by Bethesda in the next few hours and if it does end up being posted, I’ll toss out a link to it and you can decide if you’d like to share in my experiences of the barren wastelands of the Mojave.
Either way thanks for swinging by this little blog and I hope everyone out there has a great day!