WriteAway

I started this blog months ago to post a travel journal for my family and friends when I moved from Ohio to California. Then I got busy looking for a job and doing freelance work, and abandoned it. Now, and this is a long story so I’ll go into it later, I’m back in Ohio and working on building up my freelance client base so that I can — what else?–go back to California.

In looking for freelance projects, I found that many of them involve WordPress blogging. It was clear that I needed to become a geniune blogger in order to expand the kind of projects I’m qualified to work on. Once I understand what I’m doing here, I’ll learn to do custom designs for WordPress blogs. The current design is a template. Blog first, design later.

I’ve been writing for Helium.com recently too. It’s a workshop for writers, where we can publish articles and earn a little money for doing so, through writing articles with high peer ratings and through contests Helium runs continuously. An increasing number of publishers post requests, and writers submit articles on the requested topics. The publishers pick their favorites and purchase them. You can view my profile (under my Helium pen name); once in the profile, click on the Articles tab for a list of what I’ve written since I joined on January 10, 2008, then click on an article to read it.

If you’re interested in writing on Helium, send me an email and I’ll invite you, which earns me a few pennies here and there (but only if you write). The invitation has to come from me for me to get credit if you join the community. Ask me about it, or visit Helium.com and have a look at the User Guide, or use the What is Helium? link on the top left of the home page.

One of the things I like about writing is that the basic “technology” doesn’t change much. It you love language, have the skills, and keep working on improving them, you might have to learn about new places to write, but it doesn’t involve learning a whole new skill set to be able to write. Web design, graphics, and related work takes a long time to learn and, just about when you think you’ve got it down, everything changes. Also, writing an article is a lot faster than creating original graphics or designing a website.

So I’ve decided to focus on writing, editing, document design, and various related work and am definitely available as an independent contractor. I also do photography (not commercially) but spend time, when I can, in Photoshop, learning to use the upgrades in the latest version, and using what I learn to turn my perfectly good photos into digital art. I think I’ll be showing some of it this summer, and will probably post some in a separate category here in the near future. Prints in various sizes will be available, so check back from time to time if you’d like to see my work. There may (or may not) be a sample somewhere on this page. I uploaded one, but have no idea where it will end up! Maybe I’d better read that part of the instructions next.

Sunny