Niche Niche Niche Niche Niche Niche Niche

You can't go anywhere in the writing world these days without hearing that word incessantly. I am seriously sick of hearing about niches. Everyone wants to serve a niche, which is perfectly fine. I just wish they'd stop using that word. I am not a niche writer and I never will be. I'll write about anything and I'm proud of it.

I went into journalism because it meant doing something new every day. Being a reporter required constant exposure to new topics. I went out to a logging company and learned all about logs and the timber industry. I went to a factory that made grocery store freezer doors, learned all about them, and wrote an interesting article about those suckers. Even if you're a beat reporter, you learn so much every day and that's still the type of writer I want to be. An unfamiliar topic doesn't scare me. A client wants me to write about vacuums? Sure. Furniture? Absolutely. Fungal infections? Bring it on.

Where to Get Freelance Jobs and Some Ranting

I keep finding more and more freelance writing job sites. There's one in particular that does very well among the freelancers I'm acquainted with- *nevermind, I hate this site*. It has an excellent reputation among freelancers for finding jobs and gigs that pay well and aren't morally questionable. The only problem I have with the site is that I've never gotten a thing that I've applied for through there. Some of them are great projects- ones that I am more than qualified to do, but for some reason am never chosen. I do have a theory about the reason, though.

Another interesting one is Writer's Weekly. Most of what I see there is for print publications. I don't write for print anymore, but I plan to again someday and love to see what the market is like. Their listings are a great reminder of how high the price is for print publications compared to web writing. Of course, so much of print writing is on spec, which I don't have the time or the finances to do right now.

The Writer's Resource Center freelancing pages are quite thorough. You can search by type of writing or even by which state you're in. The quality of jobs looks great, but there are so many that I can spend forever looking at them and then I rarely get around to applying for anything.

This brings me to one of my biggest issues with web writing- the first-come-first-hired mentality. When I look through Freelance Writing Jobs, Elance and some of the other sites I frequent, I've developed the habit of either emailing the job to myself to look at later or opening a tab for interesting projects and applying for them when I have time. What happens, almost every single time, is that the job is taken by the time I apply. Sometimes the job has only been posted for a matter of hours. I can't fathom hiring the first person who applies, but apparently that's the way people are doing it. I don't get it, and I don't see how it can get them the best work possible. Isn't that what they want? Sometimes not. All too often people just want content quickly and for as cheap as they can get it. That's what is populating the web right now- cheap crap. I see Elance projects that I wanted going to people with portfolios filled with the worst imaginable copy. This is copy written poorly, full of errors and with no discernible style of any kind. I may be going back to print quicker than I had planned to, now that I think about it.

No Time for Fiction

I'm making a living by writing, which is more important to me than just about anything else, other than offspring (and husband is running a distant third). But, I always thought that by the time this thing happened I would be writing fiction. There isn't much time for fiction these days, though I still have every intention of having a fabulous line of fascinating novels on the racks and a few hundred fan letters in the mail each day. And bagels. Fans send bagels, don't they?

I plan to eventually find a fixed, regular time for writing fiction. Someday. Eventually. But these days, the number of projects I take on has reached a dizzying pace, and none of it has anything to do with fiction. I can't seem to even get a gig editing fiction, much less time to write it. But on the bright side, I'm buying a new bed. What does that have to do with it? Nothing. Non-fiction, beds, offspring- my life in a nutshell.

Suite101

Yesterday I was accepted by Bella, and today it was Suite 101 who came knocking. Ok, I had to apply to them. Twice. But, I'm in and that's what counts. It's a site as old as the hills that has some extremely interesting topics available to its contributing writers. They aren't limited to 10 or 15 or even 100 topics- there are 3,000 separate topics and subtopics there for the taking. The subject matter includes topics as diverse as archaeological digs, motorcycle repair and the paranormal. So what to write about? Shall I be good and write about Regency literature as I had envisioned, or shall I delve into that one time I thought I saw a ghost? The answer, so far, is unclear. Where's the Magic 8 Ball? Maybe there's a topic about that...

BellaOnline

I have been hearing a few things about a site called BellaOnline recently, and everything I've heard has been favorable. They claim to be the second largest site for women on the internet, and the number of topics and readers is quite impressive. Yesterday I saw that someone who frequents a writers' board that I visit had been accepted to be an editor there. I decided to check it out and found that there were several interesting topics available- including classic rock. Now, I freely admit being a nerd, but I adore classic rock. I love doo wop, hippie music, the weirdness that was the 70's and the New Wave and punk of the 80's. I flipped at the thought of being able to write about those topics, and applied for the editor position.

This morning I was accepted and I have my own BellaOnline site! It is located at: http://www.bellaonline.com/site/ClassicRock As of right now, there is nothing on it but my name and the name of the topic. But, I hope to get it going into something that turns readers on to music they might have otherwise overlooked.

The Trouble With Ghostwriting

I love ghostwriting- I really do. I like being able to match my tone and style to someone else's site and challenge myself to write something that fits right in. People take my ghostwritten items and use them as their blog posts, as content articles and as sales copy for their websites. When I sell the rights, they have every write to do that and to use it any other way they like.

The trouble comes when someone posts a great gig writing about something that I have written about many times before. But, uh oh, all of that writing was ghostwritten. I can't link to it and point to it as being mine, and I can't show it to a potential client and tell them that I wrote it. I take the sale of rights very seriously and have never pointed out something that I have ghostwritten to anyone (except my husband). So how do I get any credibility as having experience in that genre? I wish I knew. I just don't have the time to write out original samples about every single thing that I have experience writing about. The only thing I can really do in these situations is to mention that I have ghostwritten items about the topic and hope they see that I am sincere. I don't think I've ever led anyone to believe that I am not sincere or that I engage in anything morally questionable, but there's really no way for most potential clients to know that.

The internet really is a double-edged sword. There's no reason for any client to know that I often like to listen to music and sing badly while I write. The internet offers enough privacy that I can do that and no one ever need know. You know, unless I happen to mention it in a blog or something. But, it also offers enough privacy that people can make claims about having experience in a field when they have none. The only thing that I can do is to be honest about experience when I have it and hope that clients will see that and respond to it.

Holy #%$@!

It started to get very dark this afternoon, far before nightfall. Thinking there must be a pop-up thunderstorm on the way, I checked the local radar maps online. Um, no, it isn't a pop-up thunderstorm- it's a pop-up hurricane. Working on back-to-back Elance projects all day, I had no idea that during the night an entire hurricane had formed and then hit the coast. It's the fastest forming hurricane on record and is now an hour or two away. Very, very surreal.