Wood at Work

In freelancing, as in hair metal, what goes around comes around (sometimes)

aprilswopegreene 1 Comment

In the thrill-a-minute world of freelance writing (I am only half joking there), clients can come and go as unexpectedly as the Red Bull van that pulls up beside the park and starts handing out free energy drinks. (Or am I the only one who’s witnessed that?)

Red Bull energy drink giveaway

Have you seen me?

This unpredictable ebb and flow can of course be a source of consternation for freelancers, but on balance over the past two-plus years, I’ve found it to be mostly energizing—as well as a good way to practice living in the moment: it’s unwise to become attached to even one’s most cherished clients, as you never know when they might, I don’t know, move to Canada and change their whole business model, or decide that you’ve been so helpful that they now want to hire a full-time person to do what you’ve been doing for them freelance. (Both of those things did indeed happen to me this year.)

While I’ve learned to feel less disappointment when great clients depart, I still feel untempered enthusiasm when they arrive—or, in the cases below, when they re-arrive! (Shoutout to my James Joyce people: both of these clients rearrive[d] from North Armorica. If that means what I think it does, which is debatable.)

Here’s a hearty “hello again!” to:

Sarah Lawrence College

College student in a community garden

SLC student Tenn Joe Lim: “These gardens have taught me about the agency we all have within communal spaces.”

I’ve been working in different capacities with the terrific people at this singular institution since fall 2014 (and boy is my brain getting a workout). Last month, they brought me on as Assistant Editor of their terrific magazine, Sarah Lawrence. I’m super-psyched to keep writing stories for them (like this profile of a student who’s teaching kids in a local community garden), as well as learn more about the inner workings of such a venerable publication.

PLASTARC

Architects

Some of our best and brightest at the Center for Architecture in NYC

It’s plastic (in this case, denoting malleability)! It’s architecture! It’s BOTH!

I met this workplace design consultancy’s ingenious founder Melissa Marsh at the Wood at Work conference last year, and helped her with some one-off writing projects this year. Recently, she’s decided to step up her company’s editorial game and has been showing me the PLASTARC ropes: their monthly newsletter, thoughtful event summaries, and the many guest contributions they make to industry publications. One of my fun gigs this fall was reporting on a public program called, “I Love This Place! Social Research-Driven Design.”

I’m very happy to be embarking on a new year with these two terrific new-ish clients. While I might find the lyrics to some Ratt songs as obscure as lines from Ulysses, I think I know what they mean when they sing:

Round and round
With love we’ll find a way just give it time
Round and round
What comes around goes around
I’ll tell you why
Dig

Yeah?

A reluctant blogger finally gets into blogger-hood

aprilswopegreene 2 Comments

If you know much at all about me, you know that I’ve never had a Facebook account or an Instagram account. I signed up for Twitter in 2009 so I could join Medium, but I’ve so far tweeted exactly once (to my local NPR morning show host so I could recommend he do a story about the awesome combination washing machine repair and rock collecting shop in my old neighborhood). I have been on Flickr for the past decade, and have somehow posted over 18,000 photos there in that time, but I have also accrued only 18 followers, which says something about how much I care to advertise it. The list goes on thusly.

Galah bird in Onkaparinga, Australia

One from the Flickr archives: 27-year-old me about to receive a finger bite from a gas station owner’s pet Galah bird in Onkaparinga, Australia. That’ll learn me to poke!

All of it to say that as long as blogs have been around (probably 20 years), people close and not so close to me alike have suggested that I start one. Of course I understood the idea (I’m a writer! we have the Internet! therefore, I should write on the internet!), but my reluctances ran several:

1) I’m not particularly techie, and wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to blog from the software standpoint.

2) While I have come to love writing in many genres and spend a lot of my days doing it, my most favorite writing pastimes involve composing personal work for specific audiences (journal entries that only I see, letters and emails for friends…). I didn’t want to feel like this supposedly-fun pursuit was actually work.

3) Conventional wisdom holds that the best blogs are somehow focused—on food, travel, relationships, the world’s largest collection of taxidermied frogs depicted in various everyday life situations*, etc. Since I like to write about all of those things, and many more!, how would I ever imbue my blog with a sense of focus, purpose, and cohesion?

Most of those reasons finally stopped stopping me in January of last year. At that time, I was a half-year in to my new full-time freelance writing life, for which I’d already gone through the learning pains of setting up an entire website (with a lot of help from friends like Claire here!), so the tech thing was no longer so intimidating. I found I was actually enjoying challenging myself to write in different genres, and slowly became more and more curious about how blog writing would compare to the other types I’d recently gotten practice with (including ghostwriting, post-translation polishing, and drafting static pages for websites). Plus I now had a natural focus for my blog: my life as a freelance writer! And since that in itself encompasses a lot of topics, I felt I could justify squishing them all into one blog with “freelancing” as the overarching umbrella.

Blog tags

A screenshot of my blog post tags. Too eclectic? Nah.

Since the start of 2015, I have come to enjoy these weekly diversions from writing blog posts for inspiring nonprofits and newsletters for unique conferences to reflect on the work I’ve recently done and life I’ve recently led.

As a (somehow unexpected) side benefit, I’ve also found myself crossing paths with some awesome fellow bloggers. Here are two I believe are worthy of sharing with you now: they also got roped into the Liebster Award madness recently, and both (to my amazement) took the time to post responses to the 11 funky questions I posed when I nominated them!

Have a look?

  • Nicholas Peart, aka The Slider, a British-born painter, musician, songwriter, poet, filmmaker, photographer, and traveler who wrote some stuff about his time in South Africa that I very much enjoyed.
  • Neil Scheinin, who goes by the handle Yeah, Another Blogger, a fellow self-described dabbler who writes thoughtfully about a range of fun topics, including pizza, beer, and rock music (mmm!).

In response to their responses, I will just say:

  1. Nicholas, one of my favorite popcorn toppings is a solution of garlic, olive oil, and crushed red pepper. Heat that up in a pan while the kernels are popping, then drizzle it over the bowl, sprinkle a bit of salt, and you’re golden!
  2. Neil, regarding the number of seconds by which you’ve been known to extend the three-second rule (“thousands and thousands”), I can only say: NICE WORK.

Thank you both for your camaraderie, and your good writing, in this big old Internet world. Knowing I’m in the company of such excellent dudes makes me a less reluctant blogger every day.

*Okay, Froggyland is a website, not a blog. But I’ve been dying to mention it, so I just shoehorned it in here. Apologies to the purists. (But aren’t you also speechless??)