Feast and Famine

I’m feeling cranky today and up to now, I haven’t written a thing. That’s bad. I like to write something every day when I’m at home. At least I will get this blog post written and posted.

Earlier I was about to start responding to a request in the Helium Marketplace. In fact I started a bit of research and then went back to copy the assignment guidelines. That’s when I noticed it was just for people with Premium Marketplace Writer status. Ok. I thought I had that, but I hadn’t posted anything there for a while and my star ratings are still going up and down.

So I decided to check. And what do I find? My status has dropped to Marketplace Approved Writer. I can’t write to that title for Helium. I’d wasted about half an hour plus lots of thinking time while I’d been doing household chores. It could have been worse though. I could have written the whole damn thing and not been able to submit it.

The reason I had planned to go for it in the first place was because I had already written something similar for a client, although it would have to be translated for an American readership, whereas my earlier piece had referred to UK law. It’s always good to be able to double up my use of research and cut down what’s needed for the next job.

Last month I was especially busy with sub contracted work, and didn’t have time for much else. It was a trial month and I’d hoped it would be regular work, but that’s not happening. Although I discounted it heavily, it proved too expensive to be repeated, especially as it had felt like working for even smaller peanuts than my freelance writing usually yields, so I wanted to reduce the discount a bit.

So while I had a feast of work last month, I am now in famine time. This is when I really have to motivate myself to hunt for work and even write on spec. I haven’t posted much at Constant Content either and my sales there are down. They always seem to go up when I can submit regularly, so I guess that’s the next thing I must get on with.