“Why did you do that Julia?” you might be asking.

- I did it because I was curious.
- I did it because it would look good on my resume.
- I did it because incoming cash flow is zero.

I probably wouldn’t actually take the job if I were to be the “successful candidate” (as HR types like to say), but I figured it was worth a shot. In this economy you sometimes can’t be choosy. I don’t actually want a full-time job, and am working on making it as a freelancer, but since companies are taking longer to go through their hiring process because of the state of the economy, I thought it was worth sending in my application. As I’ve often told friends, I can always say no, especially since I’m not a big fan of this company. But if, in two months time, I still haven’t made much money as a freelancer, and am coming to the end of my savings fun, and the Evil IT Company comes a-calling, I might just have to grin and accept it while I continue to look for “better” jobs.

Have you ever been in this situation? I’d like to hear your experiences.

Edit: Just secured an interview at the Evil IT Company for next week. While I’m willing to hear them out, if there’s any hint of strangeness at all during the interview process, I-am-out-of-there.

Sifting & Sorting

Who knew I’d have to spend so much time sifting and sorting through all the projects to find any that were worthwhile? Impressive. For every bid I put in (and I put in 7 of them this afternoon), I had to read at least 5 other project listings. Most of those are of the “$1 for 500 words” variety, which in my opinion aren’t worth it. I mean, even if you can churn out 2 or 3 articles an hour, that’s still less than minimum wage! You might as well go deliver pizzas, at least that way you’d get out of the house and see other people. Just kidding.

Seriously though, I can’t believe how many people are out there soliciting the services of freelance writers and then only pay them $1 or less for each article. And then they don’t even bother to proofread their own listings, so they’re rife with spelling mistakes and typing errors. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I want to work for someone who can’t spell “writer” correctly, what about you?

Phase 1 Complete

For today the first step is complete, in that I submitted bids for 7 projects (or was it 8? – I looked at so many this afternoon that I’m not sure anymore.) I should find out about them in the next week or so, and one of them was even an actual technical writing project! That was pretty rare, considering I was using the search term “technical writing”.

Phase 2 – The Waiting Begins

Now I just have to wait and see if any of my bids are accepted. A few of the projects were looking for multiple writers, so hopefully that bodes well for me. But if not, no worries, as I’ll just keep on with the rest of my marketing plan. I’ll keep you posted!

Changing Titles

I’ve never been entirely convinced of the title of this blog, so I played around with it and changed it. This helps achieve several things: by removing the “the”, it’ll pop up to the top of anyone’s RSS feed list if they’ve got it in alphabetical order. (sneaky, I know.) And I went back to the one-word “spacebarpress”. Since that’s the domain name I’m using, I thought I’d actually use it, even here.

Changing Themes

For those of you that know me outside of work, you know that I like to play around with my Wordpress themes. I try not to do it too often, and especially on this blog, since it’s my professional face to the world, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the one I’d chosen. It was a little, well, boring. I’m definitely not boring, so I hunted around in my bag o’ tricks (read: the myriad of folders I’ve got on my computer) and dug up this one from Design Disease. I was reminded of it by my new friend Yolander Prinzel, who’s using one of  DD’s themes on her personal site too, and I thank her for that. I really enjoy DD’s work, and am glad they’ve got a few free themes out there. I’d eventually like to get a unique one for me designed, but until I start pulling in some money from all this freelancing work, the free ones will have to do. But I think this one will do just fine, don’t you?

Start Blogging Regularly

This one’s an easy one. I’ve just got to start putting up regular posts here, so that y’all know what I’m up to, and that you know that yes, I do know what I’m doing in terms of technical writing.

Fixed the RSS Feed

Alistair over at itauthor.com sent me an email the other day saying that my RSS feed wasn’t working properly, and wouldn’t you know it, he was right! I’ve done some investigation over the last couple of days, and it turns out that it was a conflict between one of my Wordpress plugins and Feedburner. I deactivated the plugin this morning, and voila, problem solved. So if you’ve been trying to subscribe to my feed and just haven’t been able to, please try again, as it’s all fixed!

There you have it, the latest and greatest fromthe blog @ spacebarpress.com. Don’t forget to tell all your friends!

Of course if you look at my current lists of tweets you’ll see I actually haven’t tweeted in a while. *oops* Work has been rather trying these last few weeks, so I haven’t had much time to tweet. I’m hoping to rectify that in the next while. Stay tuned.

But what other networking tools are you using to find freelance work? Twitter? Tumblr?

Looking for inspiration
The Freelance folder in my Google Reader has steadily been growing in size as I add the feeds to various blogs around the blogosphere. Some I keep, others I delete, and then there’s the ones that I actually click on over to the site to read. (I usually just read the posts in Google Reader.) One of those special ones is Chrisblogging.com,a freelance writing site by, you guessed it, Chris! In it he talks about how he finds his writing jobs, how he structures his day, hell, he even talks about how much he makes on these jobs! Impressive to say the least, as a lot of people have a taboo about talking about money. As a noobie to the freelancing world, his candour is quite informative and appreciated.

Gathering strength
Now, you’d think that reading about all the adventures and trials and tribulations other freelance writers are going through could potentially turn me off of a freelance writing career, but you’d be wrong. As I’ve learned over the years as a technical writer, there’s always ups and downs; there are always days where you want to chuck the computer out the window; and other days where the VP of the company actually remembers that it was you that wrote that stellar software manual. At this point reading about all the adventures has made me more excited about the prospect of changing my career. I can’t wait to start being more involved with my career, of taking back the reigns and steering my own course.

I can go my own way
“Quality of life” is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, however it definitely holds meaning for me. Having lost both my parents to cancer in the last 10 years, I am reminded that there are bigger things to worry about than whether or not my SME is going to comment the hell out of the document I wrote last week, or dealing with the headache that is MS Word 2007. The stress of work has begun to take a toll on me physically, so changing the quality of my life is a priority for me. I want to spend more time with myself, more time with my family, more time travelling. As many of you freelancers have stated, “have laptop, have internet, will travel.” That’s all I need: my laptop and an internet connection. I look forward to writing software manuals while at my cousin’s kitchen table in Italy, or editing that set of release notes while sitting on my friend’s deck in Vancouver. Quality of life is where it’s at.

So keep on blogging my friends, you’re inspiring me to thought and action, getting me off my duff and helping me make my dream a reality. Stay tuned to hear about the first dollar I make!