Writing 9 to 5

When it rains, it pours...

After two months of submitting proposals to a freelance writing and editing site in an effort to get my fledgling career off the ground, I have had two job offers in the past two days, with a third party interested in "discussing things further." For the next week and a half, I will be “under deadline” as I furiously write 400-word introductory destination guides for a travel web site. I'll be covering such exotic – and not-so exotic – locales as Athens, Berlin, Brighton, Budapest, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, Florence, Lisbon, Madrid, Manchester, Oxford, Prague, Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Zurich, Bermuda, Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Whistler. Whew! I'm exhausted after just typing all that. It's a lot harder than even I originally thought; there are only so many ways you can say “this city has lots of great restaurants.” I am accessing my inner thesaurus and exercising my brain in ways I haven't since I was in grad school.

Unfortunately, I have quickly realized that I really underpriced my services, and I don't mean that in a conceited way. Normally, 400 words seem to type themselves, but when you're under pressure, those 400 words seem like 400 pages. But it's a Catch-22. Without experience on this particular site, no one was willing to hire me, and without someone willing to hire me, I couldn't possibly gain any experience. So I had to take that into account when charging for my first job. Still, I am getting paid something, and next time I'll have more of an idea of how long things will take and can hopefully be a bit more competitive in my pricing. Who knew the writing business involved so much... business.

Let's just hope Crumpet doesn't get any ideas about pushing up his/her deadline...

Okay, back to Word, where hopefully I'll get some inspiring ideas about Bermuda.