Saturday, January 28, 2012

Freelancing: Blessing and Curse

A few months ago, I was an unemployed law school graduate recovering from a major surgery and wondering what I'd do with my time if I did not soon acquire gainful employment. I was watching my fellow graduates with a bit of trepidation, as many of them were far more qualified than I was and still struggling to find jobs. Rather than sending out a hundred resumes and hoping for the best, I started to seek out other means of making money.

That was when I stumbled upon freelancing.

It isn't super-glamorous. I never really saw myself as a very technical writer before - after all, SEO has nothing to do with magic or swords - but the fact is, it's a lot better than most of the jobs I'm otherwise qualified for. I'm setting a lot of my own hours, I'm gaining a lot of education about things I never even considered researching, and the pay has been a very nice supplement to the full-time job I eventually managed to acquire.

Unfortunately it also cuts into my regular writing time. I've written maybe 1 page in the last 3 days. I was making such good progress before that. But sitting in front of a computer doing freelancing all day, then switching over to another screen to write... it carries its own kind of fatigue. It's pretty hard to switch your brain from "OK, what else can I say about crowd sourcing" to "Alright, sword fight!" (although it is quite a fun switch, when I can manage to do it).

I think it'd be better if I didn't have this awful tendency to procrastinate. I've been reading Amanda Hocking's blog off and on, as I find her story very inspiring. Her books are high on my "next to read" list, for sure. I'm currently working through Robert Kroese's Mercury books and enjoying them (I accidentally started in the middle, though, so have to go back for the first one - oops!). So whenever I find some lag time in writing about link-building techniques and how to tweak your meta tags (and really, when CAN'T you find lag time when writing about that), I find myself drifting. *SIGH* One of these days, Busy Work... to the moon!

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