Financial Insanity … and Hope
Financially, this has been the year from Hell in the Editormum household. I still have my full-time administrative assistant job, thank God, but the freelancing work fell off dramatically this year. (Note to my current clients: Thank you! I value each and every one of you in ways you cannot begin to guess.)
I have two sons, ages 12 and 13. I don’t have to tell you about the costs associated with teenaged boys. And all three of us have had expensive health problems … though mine, requiring barium x-rays, upper GIs, and other expensive tests, have been the biggest drain on the budget. And problems between the X and the kids have put me a couple of thousand in the hole to my lawyer and my sons’ therapist. On top of all of that, I was already struggling to pay off a lot of credit card debt. (Yes, I’ve stopped using them. No, not all of it is stupid stuff, though there is a hefty stupid tax in there.)
So when I looked at the Editormum balance sheet a few weeks ago, I panicked. We’ve used up every penny of my savings (including cashing out an IRA, which is going to make for a lot of fun in April), and we’re still struggling. And I decided that the time had come to get a second job. However, I needed it to be flexible and I needed it to fit around the kids’ visitation schedule and my full-time job. Not an easy task.
So I thought, editing and proofreading and writing can be done any time and anywhere I have access to a computer and the internet. I’ve got to increase my freelance income. But how? Word-of-mouth isn’t fast enough, and Craigslist was a disappointment, so I googled “freelance writing jobs.” I was, admittedly, apprehensive. I am well aware of the many scams and unethical services out there. And I actually got into a couple of them …
One of them was a company that, as I found out once I’d been accepted and started looking for projects to bid on, allows students to post coursework and dissertations and hire other people to do them. I will not accept such assignments. I signed up with this company because they also offer proofreading and editing services … and those are the only assignments that I am going to do for them. If you are in school and are told to do coursework or write a paper, do it. If you’re going to hire someone else to write your doctoral dissertation, then the writer should get the doctorate … not you. There’s a big difference between handing an editor a rough draft and saying, “Help me make this more polished and coherent, and make sure it follows the style manual” and handing someone a topic and saying, “Put together a 50-page dissertation with outline, notes, and bibliography.”
The other one was a company that offered all kinds of writing and creative work, so it sounded like a great resource and I signed up. The first job I bid on, I won. There was a 12-hour deadline, but it was only 8000 words and should have taken me only two or three hours at most. Except.
When I got the files from the buyer, they explained that they had been translated from Swedish into English, and my task was to standardize the English. OMG. I managed the first three files, totaling 1000 words, in about 90 minutes. The last file, which had a little over 7000 words, took me eight and a half hours to complete. The further into it I got, the more Swedish words remained in the “translated” text. Google translate and I became very good friends that day. And, honestly, it’s a good thing that I have a good grasp of the concepts surrounding childbirth, or I would never have been able to pull that job off. Certainly not in 12 hours.
Note to ALL non-English speaking writers: Google translate is a great tool, but it is NOT sufficient for translating technical or academic treatises. And if you’ve put your text through Google translate, don’t expect your editor to be super fast at cleaning up the grammar. It’s going to take time, and you should be willing to PAY, handsomely, for that work. Because it’s grueling.
Now, to add insult to injury, the person who bought my services for that project has not paid me (it’s been ten days since I completed the work) and will no longer respond to my e-mails. So it will be a long time before I bid on another job at that site, and I’m going to grill the prospect like Perry Mason with a hostile witness before I accept any proposals there. Oh, and any accepted bidders WILL be paying me at least 30 percent up-front. Yes. I made that mistake, too. Live, screw up, and learn.
The good news is that I have found one online site that lived up to its hype. I have already been paid nearly $100, with another $20 already in my next pay-packet, and $150 more in my project queue. And that’s in 8 days of writing for them. The projects are interesting and fun. (Well, they are for me. I like to research and write.) And payment is prompt and hassle-free. If I can keep up this rate of production, I can fill in a lot of that financial hole in just a few short months.
So Editormum is not panicked anymore. Concerned, yes. Focused, yes. Working 12 to 14 hour days, yes. But no panic. And that is a good thing.