It’s been lovely to see that I’ve had a few more visitors to the blog this week, thanks in no small part to a name-check in an oDesk newsletter, which was a welcome surprise.  But I did get one less than welcome comment in my inbox that got me thinking.  You know who you are and where you’re from, so I won’t bother naming you publicly, but let’s just set the record straight: oDesk don’t pay me to write puff pieces for them or to link to them.  Anything I write here is my own opinion that I have reached with the application of some thought - this is perhaps the one place where my pen is not for hire.

However, I can see how it may be frustrating for people if they’ve been on oDesk for a while and have yet to pick up their first job.  I’m only a month into using the site myself, so I’m hardly an expert, but I do seem to be achieving a pretty good strike rate with my candidacies so here - for what it’s worth - is my approach to applying to jobs on oDesk.

• Only apply to jobs in which you can show relevant experience: if you can’t back up your claims with some solid examples, you probably won’t be hired
• For writing, always attach a suitable sample: don’t just stick a link in
• Look at the average hourly rate, and the average hourly rate of any interviewees: this should help guide you to pitching yourself at the right price
• Consider taking on a small, fixed-price, easy job in order to get your first feedback. oDesk occasionally post such things themselves - often listed as card-sorting exercises - and that first feedback rating can make all the difference
• Personalise your applications: make it clear you have read the ad by referencing requirements in your cover letter - according to those who’ve hired me, most people don’t bother to do this, so it’s a quick win
• Proof-read your cover letter before you send it: for writing and editing jobs in particular, good grammar and spelling are important and one of the best ways of demonstrating your standard is to consider your cover letter as an article for publication.  If need be, create your cover letter in MS Word and run a spell check on it before pasting it across to the application page
• Take as many relevant oDesk tests as you can, as this is objective, third-party proof of your claim to be an expert in a given field
• Complete as much of your profile as possible: think of this as your online CV, giving you the chance to show off some of the jobs you’ve done prior to oDesk
• Don’t post your ‘job wanted’ ad in the job openings: I’m constantly amazed at the number of job wanted ads that appear in the job openings mailer each day, often from people who use bad English to claim they have excellent English writting [sic] and gramer [re-sic].  This is not going to get you hired!
• Have some dignity: begging and pleading in your cover letter without providing good reasons for the person to hire you - experience, qualifications, etc - will not get you a job.  Developing your skills and being able to provide samples of your work, on the other hand, will
• Check to see if samples of your work are required in the ad and, if so, in what format.  Don’t bother applying unless you can include them as requested by the buyer
• Always go through the day’s job openings emails early: I’m most successful on those jobs where I’ve applied the same day the ad was posted.  From observation, something that’s been sitting around unfilled for a few days is not going to be filled, as the buyer has probably sourced staff elsewhere

This is not an exhaustive list - I’m quite sure something else will occur to me once my head hits my pillow tonight - but it should hopefully provide a good place to start.  Feedback is always welcome, and it would be lovely to hear that this had helped someone get themselves work

Happy freelancing!

m xxx

It’s been a long old day.  Now, that may partly be down to the hangover I earned at last night’s pancake party.  OK, it may in large part be due to that.  But it’s also down to a very long day staring at my computer screen.

I’ve been busy on a couple of things today.  The first is another oDesk assignment, this time to restructure and rewrite a web site for someone as well as, almost certainly, revising and updating their eBook.  That’s been a fun one, because writing for eBooks is like travelling to another planet if you’re used to more traditional principles of writing, and the web sites that promote them are equally alien to someone who’s been more used, in the past, to sorting out gorgeous sites for big blue-chips and small arts facilities.

My inner red pen has had to be quite seriously suppressed throughout this process.  All I’ve allowed it to do so far is pick up spelling and grammar errors and factual inaccuracies.  And it’ll have to make do with that for the time being, because I am preparing to write some of the most cringe-worthy copy I will ever have seen.  

And yet, joking and snobbishness aside, this is copy that apparently works and sells an awful lot of eBooks.  The thought is frankly terrifying to anyone who has ever striven to write good, readable copy that is easy on the eye and communicates clearly, effectively and with a minimum of fuss… and absolutely no badgering, hectoring or gratuitous repetition of spurious ‘facts’ to get the message across.  And I’m quite concerned that there are people out there who will fall for that kind of copy.

But while it’s easy for me to look down my nose at this kind of thing, I took the job on because I was curious and this gave me a chance to have a look at this world from the inside out.  My finely-honed literary mind has been bent not on great novels but on the reasons behind the use of language, the repetition, the presentation of arguments and - believe it or not - HTML elements to create a text that not only sells but gains high page ranks in Google.  Notwithstanding the fact that the site is written in appalling non-native English at the moment, there is a clear logic behind the content and structure and it’s been as much fun analysing that as I used to have in uni days analysing Balzac: it’s trashy, but there’s a native wit you’ve got to admire.

The other project I’ve been working on is rather closer to home.  We’re about to launch a new web site for the Rag Factory, so I’ve been grinding away at the copy for that and loading it into the new CMS.  I will admit to being utterly smitten with the CMS, which is Concrete5.  It really is one of the best examples of what good programming can achieve in terms of user-friendliness and the ability to simplify tasks that lesser content management systems make hideously complex.

So while it’s been exhausting, it has probably, overall, been a good day, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and say goodnight.

OK, I admit it.  An old friend googled me the other day - no idea why, I think he knows where all the bodies are buried - and happened across the site.  I’m the first to admit that my site is a work in progress, but I admit he has a point.  He remarked that it was a remarkably empty site for a writer.

I set this site up for a few reasons.  One was that I wanted to have a play with Wordpress, so this is something of a sandbox activity for me while I get used to it, knowing that it’s not going to be getting huge traffic while I work out what I do and don’t want to do with it.

Another reason was that I have friends and family all over the world and this will hopefully give them a chance to see what I’m up to if they wish, whether or not they’re on Facebook.  It also means that people I used to know at school can take an educated decision on whether I sound like the kind of person they want to know now, before they get in touch with me on FB.  There’s nothing worse than having someone be all enthusiastic at finding you, only to have the distinct impression that the post-reunion response is ‘why in hell did I think that would be a good plan?’  What can I say - sometimes there’s a reason people don’t keep in touch.

And the other reason for putting together the site was because I’ve been getting back into the freelancing.  Some of it has been via oDesk, most other things have been with long-standing clients who now know I’m back in circulation.  But in general I wanted to be able to post samples of my writing for existing and potential clients to see.

Of all these things, all I have currently succeeded in doing is posting occasional blog entries.  Which is pretty shabby for a writer, I know.  And I apologise.  But please, be happy for me: the reason I’m not getting more articles and other stuff up here is because I’ve got lots of work on

I’m going to remove some bits of my site that are currently content-free zones to make life more simple for anyone visiting, but I promise to put some work into the other parts of my site behind the scenes, ready to unveil them in the next couple of months.

m xxx

Well, today’s schedule was supposed to involve collecting S’s passport from the Passport Office, making sure all the suitable laundry was done and start packing to go on holiday on Tuesday morning.  As you’ve probably gathered, this is not happening, or why would I mention it?

Sadly, it looks like we will now not be going on holiday for the 10 days we had planned.  It would have been our first holiday in four years - the last was our honeymoon in Budapest - and I was genuinely looking forward to it.  So, I think, was S, but we’ve decided this is really not the best time.  Not only is the economic climate having an effect on the RF, there’s still physical work required on the place to give it a fighting chance of making it through , and that won’t happen without S being here.  Likewise, getting someone else to babysit the place while we’re away would cost a fortune if we wanted someone who could be trusted to be there for all the necessary hours, and that’s money we really need to spend on other things.  And while I may be sad about this, it’s definitely the right decision for us to have taken.

Of course, it begs the wider question of how we ever get to take a holiday, moving forward.  The same issue of getting cover will still apply unless we’re prepared to block a week out of the diary in advance and simply close the place down for the duration.  This more or less means committing to a week in August, however, since that’s the quietest time of the year: all the Edinburgh shows will have finished rehearsal and we could probably take a week at the beginning of the month, before the September productions start rehearsing.  So maybe that’s the answer.

In the meantime, it feels a bit rough to have made all this effort to get passports sorted for everyone, only to not need to use them.  I’m considering taking H on a day-trip to France, since the trip will pay for itself if I buy some cigarettes for S while I’m out there, and it gives me a chance to get back to a country I love and haven’t visited in close on 8 years.  I can also buy books and DVDs for H to help him learn the language, find a decent boulangerie and eat my last ever French gluten, etc.

Ho hum.  Having come back to this some time later, what really strikes me is that I am not desperately upset about missing out on a holiday, nor have I any desire to throw a fit of the sulks.  Which means this is clearly the right decision, however sad.  I shall instead make preparations for a lovely Valentine’s meal for S, H and I - I’m sickening for dim sum, so it may be time we did that again.  Holidaying at home may not be such a bad idea after all

Incidentally, I tried calling Ryanair to cancel our flights.  After all, even if we can’t use them and know we won’t get a refund, that doesn’t mean nobody else has a use for our seats.  And I’m one of those who prefers to be courteous and notify people if I’m unable to be where I’m expected for some reason.  Well, not according to Ryanair.  They told me they had a ‘no-cancellation’ policy and that there was no need for me to have contacted them.  So there’s still time for us to change our minds if we wish, or to change the names on the tickets if someone else wants to use them, so by all means get in touch if you fancy flying to Perpignan from Stansted on 17 Feb and returning on 28 Feb.  There’s doutbless a fee - isn’t there always? - but I have three tickets gathering electronic dust.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking it was time to get started working again.  Lots of potential upsides, it goes without saying, but since I don’t really want to put H into nursery full-time and I look like a bag of spanners on the best of days, a traditional job that needs me to go into an office somewhere is probably not going to be the best option.

On the other hand, I don’t really want to be doing Avon sales, or Innovations catalogue sales or similar because that still involves going out and the psoriasis is making me far too self-conscious for anything but handing over money at the average checkout.  And it’s been so long since I moved in some of my previous circles that I really don’t have current contacts.  All the recent stuff I’m allowed to talk about (no NDA, no Official Secrets) has been for S and his various ventures, so hardly an objective reference, even if the work I did was good.  Ah, what to do?

The only thing I’d been doing on even a semi-regular basis was writing articles on Helium.com.  It’s a great site and has had the virtue of giving me the courage to get off my backside and write again.  Some articles I’ve written because there was a gap in their database I could fill, others have been in their weekly writing competitions, where I’ve picked up the odd prize.  Pretty much all of them have earned me some click-through revenue in Helium’s revenue-sharing model, and it’s nice to be able to withdraw those funds to Paypal from time to time.

The kicker is that I only wrote a couple of the articles with SEO in mind, just to see if I could still do it.  Which is fine, since the two articles are ranked 1st and 2nd respectively for their keywords.  It’s no coincidence, therefore, that my article revenue on those pages is good.  So I set to thinking.  I can either optimise my other articles on Helium, submit the changes, and get only a share of the increased revenue, or I can rewrite them and post them on here.  Or I can rewrite them and post them to another site that gives me Adsense boxes on my articles with my own Publisher ID taking the revenue.

And then I had another thought, which is that all the Adsense and Helium revenues take a while to start flowing, and would require a major volume of articles to make a living from.  Was it time to stick my head above the parapet and see if someone would simply pay me to write things for them?  Like they used to in the good old days?

This has a lot of merits in theory: work as much as I want, when I want, with visibility over how much I’ll get paid and when.  But it also brought me back to my previous thoughts about the lack of a current network.  Ahem.  Well, thank God for the internet!  I’ve been so lacking in confidence it had never occurred to me that someone might be prepared to hire me without a personal recommendation for this kind of stuff, even though I objectively know that this happens every day to other people.  Gulp.

And so, with a little scouting about, I decided to experiment on just the one site, to see what kind of response I might get.  The site I chose was oDesk, largely because it had a few jobs listed I thought I might be able to do.

For those not familiar with oDesk, it’s a neat little site that puts providers and buyers in touch with each other and allows them to give mutual feedback to help future clients/providers make an educated decision about who they want to use.  Since each assignment also adds to your online CV, you gradually build up a body of work that also helps people see what you’ve been capable of before, and allows you, I suspect, to push your hourly rate up a bit.

The upside is that anyone can join in, and there are tests you can take to make up for a lack of oDesk experience.  The downside is that established buyers often won’t look at newbies for jobs, and the openness of the system - membership is free - means that there are many people offering their services for all kinds of jobs for which they aren’t qualified, so you have to try that much harder to get yourself noticed.  Also, competition from people in India and the Philippines lowers the pay rate and perceived value of some activities, so you don’t necessarily get as much as your experience might normally be worth.

However, the economy is in recession, the work is convenient, and you can pick and choose what you apply for, so the balance seems pretty good.

In the week since I joined oDesk, I’ve applied for some 20 jobs, and I am overwhelmed by the response.  Of the jobs I’ve applied for, 25% have taken me as far as shortlist stage: one buyer has said they want to use me in the future on a different project, 2 have given me jobs and 2 have taken me to shortlist and will be letting me know in the next couple of days whether I’ve got their gig.  And one other will be interviewing me at the end of February for an ongoing part-time job.

To say I’m gobsmacked would be something of an understatement.  I’ve ‘met’ some great people already, whether it’s Dip, who shares my love of research, Tom, who shares my sarcastic sense of humour or Emma, who not only has a similar sense of humour, but also some of the same professional experiences.  It’s been hugely encouraging, and I’m gradually gaining in confidence.

So hello world.  You’re no longer talking to a full-time mum, you’re talking to someone who makes their living as a writer again.  How good did it feel to write that?!!!

It seems that, no matter how depressed I get, there are still some things that manage to break through and cheer me up.  I’ve been having a bleak few weeks, with the hideous feeling of falling slowly off something high and slippery, dropping a little further as each nail breaks in turn.

So while everyone else in the UK appears to have spent the last 48 hours bitching about the government in general and Boris Johnson in particular not getting their act together to ensure there is no more than a cosmetic impact on life, I’ve been finding something to make me smile.  If it makes me shallow, so be it, but I can’t see a harmless British snowfall without thinking about other times.  Usually better times, when I was too young to have a clue what I wsa letting myself in for.

I spent yesterday afternoon watching the snow fall on the Cotswolds, warming my feet by an imitation log fire I could turn up or down with a simple remote control.  I also found many reasons for not letting my toddler out to play in it while it was still falling.

All the while I was anticipating this morning, when the sky was set to clear and the temperature warm slightly once the wind had died down.  Predictably, H had lost interest in the snow before breakfast, preferring to return to his toy cars, so it took close on an hour to persuade him to get suitably dressed - he might have been happy to go out in his PJ’s and just the one shoe, but being the mean Mummy I am, I bundled him into fleeces and lined trousers and off we went.

It was probably the high spot of my week.  For just half an hour, our entire focus was on the construction of a snowman.  It seems there are some skills you never really forget, and no matter that it looks like a bleached out version of Fungus the Bogeyman, we were all proud of the effort.

So I’m glad it snowed and gave me a good memory for the future.  But God help Boris et al if my train to London gets cancelled tomorrow morning!