Postcards from Lisbon #1

Hi all!

After a two-year hiatus, I finally came home to Lisbon for a four-day visit. We had a wedding over there, and my boyfriend was the Godfather, which makes me... the Godfather's Wife! Now, isn't that exciting?!

We came back a day later to Spain, as Vueling cancelled our morning flight, and we were stuck until 22.00h in Portugal. This means that I've got work piled up, and angry clients waiting for answers about pending projects.

As I can't really write now about this wonderful return (bah!), I give you a glimpse of home, so you can see where I come from, and how good a tourist in my own country I am.






I will be posting soon, and prosper.

Freelancing: It’s a Jungle out There!

Freelancing as a writer and a journalist is not a walk in the park: it’s a test to your patience and adaptability. Proving yourself to a potential client can sometimes be a complicated task, and finding the projects that speak more to you is like looking for a needle in a haystack. As a freelancer who has been on this road for about two months now, I felt that it was time I put to words some of the impressions I have gathered so far about this craft. I hope this article may help fellow writers and journalists, and it is my desire that I can be another voice being heard about how some things must change for the better.

The Hot Topics
Most clients wanting to hire freelance writers are looking for people who can write up to 700-word texts on interesting topics, such as real estate, business, finance, mortgages, dating, becoming rich on the Internet, or divorce. Some topics may be eluding me right now, but the core idea is this. These texts are supposed to be Search Engine Optimized (SEO), which means that one or more keywords must be used throughout the text, so that search engines can pick the client’s webpage as high as possible on a search list.

Making a living out of freelance writing
If you are into the topics above, and you’re not itchy about repeating words till exhaustion, then you can perhaps have a shot at this freelancing thing. But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg: the fees most of these clients are willing to pay won’t buy you candy, not to mention give you a living wage.
Do you value your writing? If you do, then the road will get bumpier, as clients usually ask for a maximum of $2 per 500-word article. This means that if you spend one hour alone writing in your computer, you would have to spend 200 hours to make $400. In an eight-hour day job, you work 160 hours a month, and you can be paid at least the double.
This is the reality a freelance writer stumbles upon when entering the market.

A Global Market
Thinking global is great: you can be in Spain, as I am, and work for clients in the United States or Argentina, if you can write in English and Spanish. That means that you can expand your client network beyond your borders, and meet interesting people. However, thinking global also implies that the competition is beyond your borders, and fierce. You have to take into consideration that the value of the currency you are being paid in is different if you’re a freelancer in, let’s say, India. A European or American writer will charge higher fees than a writer in Africa or Asia, due to the differences in the cost of life. Clients consider those and act as any other capitalistic-minded businessperson: they will choose the worker who charges less and, in their minds, is more eager to please.

Freelance Freebies
This is something that happens more than you may imagine. It is not an open invitation, since websites such as Elance punish these practices. A buyer will scarcely approach you, asking you to perform the project for free. What usually happens is that, in the process of negotiating the project assignment, the client asks you to do an article or more as a trial. A good, committed professional will be eager to please, and he or she will do it in a heartbeat.
The result tends to be the same, all the time: the client disappears, and the freelancer has no option to ask for payment. As a conclusion, you discover you have wasted your precious time – time is money – And you find your nice text sample posted on someone else’s website. It’s one of those moments when you feel like stuffing the Dumb hat in your head, right?


Surviving in the jungle
Use the freelance marketplace websites as means to gain experience, and to create a good portfolio. When you feel that it’s enough, use what you’ve learned and what you’ve written to query magazines and newspapers you want to freelance for.

Do not ever give away freebies. It speaks badly of you, and it’s a waste of time. If your portfolio is already available for clients to see, then they should be able to assess if you’re a good and professional writer. If that’s not good enough for the client, then the client surely is not good enough for you.

Some people’s writing is worth $0.01.
Ask yourself honestly: is your writing worth that?

Read the client’s project proposal carefully. If your sixth sense tells you it’s not for you, then it is not for you.

If you are not into the hot writing topics, write about what you know and love, and publish it in Constant Content, for example. Not everybody is interested in business, real estate, dating and such.

Don’t quit your day job, but make time to launch yourself as a freelancer. That way, you always have something to fall back to if one of the two things goes wrong.

Freelancing as a writer is not a career from which you start ripping benefits in the first month. As with any other business, it takes time to get a place in the market, and sell.
For that, be patient and work.

Last, but not the least – keep you chin up and do not lose your self-respect. If you are good, consistent and hard-working, you will make through the difficulties.

Luck protects the audacious!

Just got a call from an italian restaurant in the city centre: they want to have an interview with me for a j-o-b.

Now, that's more like it! Part-time, possibly dinner time during weekdays, in walking distance from my place...

Thank you Goddess!

The journalist/cleaning lady

Today I had a job interview. Yeah, a job interview for one of those safe, 9-to-7, receptionist jobs for a pepper and spices producer in the whereabouts of Murcia. I’m usually very happy when I go to a job interview, and I do my best to please the person on the other side of the table. That explains why, in all my work life, I’ve only lost one job.

Well, after this morning, make it two…

This was the first time in my life I went to the interview feeling defeated before I even started. Honestly, I didn’t want that job. I mean, I want to find a nice part-time job, so that I can keep on freelancing. I’m not even fancy about said part-time job: if I find myself cleaning toilets for 4 hours a day, I can live with that… well, not toilets, but maybe stairs… the journalist cleaning lady… yeah…

Anyway, it was one of those full-time, receptionist jobs, in which you think you’re going to be answering phones all day, but you end up doing accountancy and God knows what else, for the sake of “boredom”. In my world, that means you are paid the wage of half a person, to do the work of three. In another lifetime – six months ago – I would have taken the job in a heartbeat, especially because freelancing is not extremely compensating now, in terms of cash.

I was unable to lie: I had to say my ex-future-boss I could not do it. In a time when jobs offers are slim and few, I did everything I could to get out of there jobless. Then, I had to explain the temp agency lady that I wanted to go on the interview to check it out, even knowing in my heart that job was not for me.

My welfare ends in September, and I hope that by then something has come up: either some regular freelancing projects, or a part-time job doing whatever. Better yet, both.
Nevertheless, I’m stupidly proud of myself. It was the first time in my life I felt proud to be a rotten, poor and naked writer.

So if you or anybody else (I included) thought that The House of Words and its sole tenant were just an experience, here’s the absolute proof: marianexpress dumped a steady job in favor of the unstable writing life.

Editors and clients out there, please hire me soon! ;-O

Improving the blog, improving myself

While the website does not kick off, it is important to make this blog a better introduction to my personal project: launch a freelancing career as a writer and a journalist. So if you are reading these lines, you may have noticed that The House of Words’ blog has a new face, a new label organization and offers now the possibility to subscribe to a RSS feed.

These improvements come also with a change in my perspective towards this challenge, due to a couple of months investigating full-time about what it is like to be a freelance writer on the Internet. Launching yourself solo on a business is always difficult, especially if you are doing it in a market full of options for potential clients. I ask myself all the time: what do I have that makes me different from the thousands of writers and journalists who are jumping into the Internet Freelancing World?

At the risk of sounding as if I am selling myself, I suppose that the fact that you are reading these lines already answers, in a way, why my voice is somehow being heard.
I want more people to bump into this blog, and accompany my progress into this world; I want clients and editors to become interested in my writing skills; I want to work, not just for the money, but especially for the gratification it is to do my craft well, and feel great about it.

Last week, I read a great book called Journalism 2.0, by Mark Briggs. I would like to write a post about it later on, but before that, I advise you to go and read it. It really puts the craft of journalism into perspective, and in terms of the new media revolution, it is a manual on how to work with the Internet as a resourceful tool. It is a mind-opening book, and I have really learned a lot from reading it.

Therefore, as a conclusion to this post, by improving this blog, I also want to improve myself as a professional and as a writer. If you are a regular visitor, or if you have just found this blog, please feel free to post comments and help The House of Words grow in quality. Everybody’s feedback is welcome and needed, so I can become better and better.

Learning the benefits of proofreading

I am an impatient person. Things have to happen now; results must be good and come fast; I tend to love or hate in a matter of minutes; I hate waiting and any process that takes time leads me to think I’m hitting a dead-end. Obviously, that reflects in my writing.

I was always the great student who, in exams, would write five pages in half an hour, and immediately hand them in: my work is finished, so just take it! And obviously, those genially expressed essays would have errors.

Later on, as a journalist back home, I did not have to worry so much about that sort of mishaps, because there was always an editor to revise my texts and polish them. Even as a freelancer, when you hand in your work, someone will do the revision. But that was when freelancing was a traditional activity for traditional media.

Nowadays, in the Era of Internet, freelancers are expected to not only write the text, but also revise it themselves. It saves clients time, and the freelancer’s work is not just a completed task: it is a business card. Adjusting to that mentality takes time, especially if you are like me, an impatient person.

It has happened to me not once, nor twice, but more than that. I write an article or another kind of text, and I submit it. Obviously, as the speed of thought does not equal the speed of writing, the result ends up being good in its essence, but bad in terms of writing quality. So I am finally becoming aware of the need to proofread and revise more than once my writing, because if I do not, I will come off as a bad writer.

First thing I do is to ask for help. I have a colleague at one of the websites I write for who has a look at my work, from a language point of view, and from a content point of view. It is hard to come to senses with the fact that you may be failing as a writer, but it is a necessary step to improving. More than that: before I even have it proofread, I just let the text lay on my desk for 24 hours, and then I come back to it and revise it again.

It is not just a matter of being proud of my work: it is mainly a matter of being sure that what I am delivering is right. In good conscience, I cannot submit bad writing. It speaks badly of my skills and my abilities, and it hurts my clients’ credibility when they use my work publicly.

So now, it is proofreading time! It is great to feel I am improving as a writer and learning new things.

New emails

Now, you can contact me through the following email addresses:

info@thehouseofwords.com or
mariana@thehouseofwords.com.

The website will be coming soon!