part of the problem now
Remember way back when the internet was only half ruined? Back before AOL was a web portal? Pre-Google days? 1996, say. Back then, you could research a term on AltaVista and get solid hits and great references. But then the junk began to appear. Articles that were nothing more than gibbering concatenations of phrases designed to lure a hit, or similarly nonsensical lists of hot topics tacked on the end of a half-hearted attempt at relevant content. And nowadays, a vast proliferation of trashy pap, recycled general knowledge or widely circulated misinformation, reproduced over and over until you spend much more time wading through bilge than actually gleaning any useful information.
All in the name of search engine optimization. Hits are a hot commodity, and so is rank on a Google search. Those dopey articles repeat keywords over and over, and who cares if they are written at an 8-year-old’s reading level. Or even if they’re wrong.
Here’s what really irks: Somebody is getting paid to produce that crap! Somebody not me!
Okay, I don’t really want to write the worst of the drivel. But there’s plenty of writing to be done, and I am happy to have found a marketplace that, so far, looks legitimate and even intelligently designed…maybe even ingenious.
Textbroker.com is just that, a text broker. You can sign on as a writer, get assigned a level, work your way up to better rates. The word rate is abysmal for the most part, but on the other hand, you can pick your poison. There’s always some kind of work. Clients create job orders and specify what they need and pick a writing level/rate, and the writer can look through the list and pick up whatever looks promising.
Just to give you an idea, level 5, the highest level for writers, pays 5 cents per word. I was getting 8 cents per word for that asbestos research work I did a while back. Not great pay, but not bad for a newbie freelancer, I thought. Five cents is pretty sorry, but okay considering you can pick your topic, turn down the work, even throw it back in the pot without penalty if you change your mind. The only (giant) problem is that Textbroker rarely gets level 5 jobs. And the next level down pays 1.4 cents per word.
That’s the brilliant part for them. The brilliant part for the writer, or at least the part that makes this possibly better than slave labor, is that clients can request a particular writer directly, and for those assignments, the writer can set her own rate. So it’s possibly a foot in the door for the right writer, and meanwhile it’s not such a bad introduction to freelancing life…you don’t have to get stuck with dreadfully boring topics, and you don’t have to fully embrace the feast-or-famine nature of freelancing with this setup.
It doesn’t seem likely you’d ever earn a living from these guys. Still, I’m finding it useful in its way. I pick topics that I can cover without research, or else things I might like to learn about anyway. As an info junkie, I frequently entertain myself with short ADD-fueled bursts of Googling—and why not regurgitate words and make a few cents in the process? It’s been helpful to me to sit down and knock out 400 words fast. I don’t have time to get bored, and each little article reminds me that writing is not hard, not a big mystery, not a big effort to begin—something I need to relearn constantly.
The real winners here are the people running Textbroker. It’s such a perfect combination of exploitation and opportunity. I wish I’d thought of it.
pointy kitty
A couple of days ago I noticed that we were going through rather a lot of chicken feed out there in the coop during the dark hours when I know the ladies are getting their beauty roost. It’s the old chicken tractor, but I removed the bottom at one point to put better wheels on, so it’s not critter-proof. And so far so good; the only real predator at hand is our own dog. But we were certainly feeding something uninvited. So I picked up the feeder last night before dark.
Took it back out there this morning and all was well, until Milo the PITA dog came outside and promptly went ape shit. Barking snarling digging slavering biting at the deck–and from underneath, hissing and gaping mouth and teeth, which I had to quick make sure wasn’t a rattler. Between the decking I couldn’t see much, but finally I got a look at fur that didn’t seem to be dog, and then a snout. And then an eyeball, followed closely by resumed teeth and hissing.
I saw a baby possum once on my back porch and it was cute, but there is nothing cute about this grownup one lurking under my deck, actually fighting back at my fighting dog. There’s a malevolent look about the masked eye, the pointy snout. And you know there’s a ratty tail hanging there somewhere. I hope the dog has convinced it that this is not a comfortable neighborhood. The free night-time buffet is definitely closed for the foreseeable future.
All of which is to say, I’ve promised to get some writing done this summer–it’s close enough to summer already, here–and this is the writing hour, and I hate like hell to pull up a blank page and get back to work on Annie. Blogging seems a fair warm-up.
jamming
Dad says I should blog more. I agree. If I’m not blogging, you can be sure I’m not writing anything else either…’cause this stuff is basically effortless. And a warmup for other endeavors. And fueled by any damn thing, really.
Except that…once I stop, it begins to look harder. It looms larger. It weighs so much, that need to start again, it’s so important, there’s so much raw material backing up behind the dam that it all begins to compress into a huge mass out of which I cannot tease one single thread to take hold of. I’m the same way with everything, I’m afraid. Certainly with the two novels half- committed. With the housework. With the sewing. With all the creative projects. None of them require anything in any way terribly difficult, taken step by step, but once I stop doing them for any length of time, they’re enormously difficult to start again.
I have so many things to say. None of which matter, exactly. It’s all whistling in the dark, innit?
But none of those things will come free until I grab hold. It’s quite the log jam. Or….ugh. I am just now remembering being a kid, 9 years old maybe, and getting mats in my thick stubborn hair, because a brush wouldn’t go all the way through it. Nobody bothered to figure that out, and instead I was shamed and blamed for being…what? Lazy? I would sit and work out the tangles with my fingers, tiny bit by bit. The same way I need to unstick my motivation, my ideas, all this ridiculous crowd in my head.
bloggers and bios and bears, oh my
Yes, I know. I’ve been neglecting my blog. It’s all that power gone to my head. The post on Schulz drew in a record number of hits…I’m contemplating just writing book reviews, only I can’t read that fast. Actually yes, I can, but not if I also have to do inconvenient things like work. Or write a blog.
Meanwhile, I got added to a complete stranger’s blogroll. I don’t know why, but thank you, lovevshateblog, for making my day. Naturally I quit blogging for the rest of the week…sorry about that. Got busy at work.
I’m happy to say it looks like asbestos is over with, finally. Except the bio came back to haunt me. I’m getting hits from people searching on writing a writer’s bio, so here’s a follow-up: go ahead and tweak. Just because you don’t want to sound like you’re grasping at straws doesn’t mean everyone else will be so particular. You’ll end up looking like the one who has no accomplishments to speak of. Fortunately for me, we’re re-doing the whole bio page for everybody. The client has requested that we sound more technically qualified. The website brags about the quality of its research staff and writers, but I know who produced this stuff…people like me!
Anyway, I rewrote. I rejected about a dozen ideas that flitted across the mental screen until I had an absolutely true but largely irrelevant description of work I’ve done. There’s a line I won’t cross…I’ve read plenty of similar blurbs (about people known to me) that gave me a laugh. Or at least pause. I’ve decided that every phrase in my bio has to be defensible, and even mock-proof. So there.
And hell, we’re writers. We can make anything sound like anything, can’t we?
garage sailing
Here’s my theory. You can only really appreciate garage salegoing (not as a noun; nobody could appreciate it as a noun) if you are the kind of person who has spent some time in your life waking up on Saturdays feeling as if a large part of you had died in the wee hours of the morning while you were asleep or passed out, due entirely to self-abuse, and then spent most of the rest of the day recovering so you could do it again on Saturday night. This person who can now get up with the chickens on Saturday morning, have a cup of coffee and pull out of the garage at 8:00 and go out and knock down prices all over the neighborhood–this person rules the known universe.
Today I found a lovely knitted wool serape, destined to be turned into a vest for my poor cold self (or I will be a poor cold self if it EVER gets cold here, which I am beginning to doubt, as I do every year until some time around Halloween when the first blue norther blows in), a small wire basket, a lovely wrought-iron pushcart plant stand, and a (probably replica) antique milk can, only somewhat rusty, perfect for practicing faux finishing techniques.
I need practice. I need faux finishing. I need wool textiles and sewing plans, I need to give the pushcart a tasteful verdigris look, I need small baskets to dress up and fill with eggs. I need projects.
Because—let’s be honest—I don’t want to finish my novel.
No, that’s not quite right. I certainly want to have finished it. I just don’t want to wade in there and do the dirty work.
This is a second novel. I got the first one out of the way. The second half of it was good; the first half was embarrassing. It’s safely tucked away in a drawer somewhere. This second one is also something I needed to write, and I need to have written, only I can’t quite figure out how.
The main character is a reforming alcoholic. So no duh, that part’s easy. I know how to portray a failing yet hopeful reformed drinker. Intimately. No problem.
She cruises for relationships online. Not hard at all. I adore my own genius for internet real-time conversations, IRC channels, chat, whatever you want to call it. I swear, I should write a whole novel in chat-speak. You’d wet your pants laughing.
She hates an abusive man who tried to rape her. (Wouldn’t you?) Here’s where it gets difficult. Here’s why I started writing.
Maybe you should just never write what you need to write? No, I don’t believe that for more than a half a second. Passion comes from there, that wound, that issue that lies unresolved and unstilled, undistilled, that stirs up whatever you’ve got until it boils and explodes and screams for an exit.
Hatred is the issue here for me. It hurts me. It’s worse for me than the asshole himself, the guy who stalked and scared me. It’s more detrimental than the realization that I’m still, now and then, scared by the handwritten envelope in the mail, the phone ringing at 11:20 p.m., the doorbell when I’m home alone.
Hating somebody hurts you. It’s not likely to hurt that other person much. He already knows; he lies, he finagles, he tells himself whatever he needs to believe. You’re pretty much SOL if you really need to convince the whole world that you’re right and he’s wrong.
Fortunately, that’s not my problem. My problem is, I still hate the guy. And it’s wearing a hole in my psyche. Annie, my novel’s main character, is in the same position. I thought I could write her and resolve me. No such luck.
I don’t think I can write her until I resolve me.
I need more garage sales.
dirty industry
Okay, now I just hate people. Humans are horrible. I’m writing about asbestos and shipbreaking, and it’s a nauseating story. Go ask Google and see for yourself.
Oh, the places you’ll go, as a freelancer. On the other hand, I had to quick figure out how to mark up .pdf files last night for a proofreading test, so now I know something useful. Adobe Acrobat professional version is quite nifty for remote editing and markup…also a bit pricey for me at the moment, so thank you Adobe for free trials. If I get lucky I’ll have occasion to pay for the whole deal.
