Freelancing and unrelated frustrations

Besides looking for regular jobs, I’ve been trawling the freelancing website Elance.com, without luck, until Thursday. Someone needed something written, I showed them how I would handle it, and they liked my style and/or my price. This job will not make me rich, famous, or sublime, but I am now officially a freelance writer.

A website wants witty product descriptions. I saw that, and thought, “I’m witty.” I ran over to Amazon.com and wrote descriptions of a couple of items picked at random from Today’s Deals, and thusly my wit was demonstrated.

I’ll share one write-up that I did as a sample, because, well... anyway, here’s a riff on some earrings:

“Whatever the holiday, it’s always the right season to decorate your loved ones! Find the perfect shape and color for your favorite set of ears. Choose 6mm or 8mm gemstones for people with little ears or big ears. Choose round or checkerboard cut stones for people with round ears or square ears. Choose from all sorts of gems to look lovely on blue ears, red ears, green ears, or ears of any color. If you love anyone with ears, you’ve found the perfect gift for them.”

Yeah, someone wanted more of that.

I spent some time writing in more detail about the project, but then I thought better of it. Going into freelancing I think I’ll make the decision now not to talk about specific clients and jobs. While there would always be something to talk about, sooner or later that something would be unprofessional to get into. I’m going to try to be professional about this. I’ve never really been able to sell myself as the flamboyant rebel or bunny-ears lawyer.

Today contained a number of frustrations. Scanner trouble, for one, although that at least resulted in me getting some use of an upright HP Scanjet I got back in college. I’d fancied I might use it for my digital art ambitions, but I soon became less ambitious in that sphere. I also stepped on the stupid thing almost immediately (My college roommates who read this will not be surprised that that could happen.) and put radial cracks across the glass pane. Luckily, it seems the cracks were not in the business end, and it still scans fine.

Long story short, it’s nice occasionally to be glad you did something that didn’t work out like you wanted back when you did it.

Other frustration, not so easily resolved: the Xbox 360 died last night in the middle of a Skyrim session. So it goes. The game froze and I got graphical bugs like I hadn’t seen since the last time I saw an NES break down. At first I was ready to blame Bethesda (again) and rant about buggy A-list games. (Is it too much to ask, that in addition to being innovative, awesome, fully-realized, etc., etc., it also work?) Every time I reset, though, the freeze came faster and faster, until the box started dying before the console even read the disc.

These things happen. It was old, and I guess it was time to go. The fact that ever since I bought it I had to give it a good whack at just the right time to make the disc tray open probably didn’t prolong it’s life any.

Right now I could do without buying a new game console, but I bit the bullet and ordered the cheapest refurbished machine I could find that looked likely to work. I’m not broke yet.