Life in the Freelance Lane
Whoosh! Zoom! That is the sound of millions of would be telecommuters racing past me toward potential paid work from home work.
Roughly one decade ago I realized my hidden talent for storytelling. Not to mention editorial commentary. Hush now, I said don't mention it. I also discovered some latent artistic talent using GIMP, both as an original artwork creator and as an image manipulator.
I had this blog, which I designed after learning a bit of XML coding, and the other blog, as well as the Facebook Page. I even entered exactly one short-story fiction writing contest IN 2011, made the first cut, received an encouraging critique from one of the judges, and then, well, nothing.
For some reason, I dropped the ball on the blog, and on the storytelling, and on the graphic design, or maybe I just lost my muse. The result is the same either way. Ironically, I managed to keep posting long-winded ravings on Facebook, except they ended up on my personal page, but apparently doing a blog was just too taxing on my delicate psyche.
We will never know.
The point is that I could presently have clients lining up to pay me to write for their blogs, to design their web pages, using my (what would have been) 10 years of accumulated posts, artwork, and experience writing XML code as my resume. Which of course I didn't do and no longer remember how to write the code. Or maybe my own blog would have tons of traffic by now and I would be collecting advertising revenue, with no bills.
Again, we will never know.
What we do know, is that it is never too late to start. I lost a lot of pictures and documents when my external hard-drive crashed in 2014 but it turns out that enough of my designs are still on my Zazzle and Photobucket accounts to serve as portfolio filler. And the blog posts are still here, with a few on Facebook. So it’s a place to start.
Add to all of that my recent work for the Fire District, a particularly attractive newsletter I take full credit for, and assorted odds and ends, I am well qualified, just unknown.
Once my Freelancer portfolio is fuller, perhaps I can finally start earning money as a creative artist versus an administrative paper pusher. Not that I am getting paid to do that either.
There were a few articles I wrote back then that I am updating and using in my portfolio and I am reworking the short story for re-submission to either another contest or a full publication. I am doing the same with the Adult story I wrote for the other blog. There is no real use for the BSG commentaries, unfortunately.
And I am going to take that epic novel I have been claiming to write all these years and break it down into novellas that can be self-published as a series of eBooks instead of one giant manuscript that would be a pain to get published let alone sold. I am likely to do the same with the two short stories as well.
Once I have a best-selling series on Amazon, some publisher will beg me to let them publish the whole series in one book. And then beg me to write more.
We can only hope.
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