Freelance work can vary from almost fun to kill-me-now miserable. Once in awhile, if you’re lucky, you might actually learn something. Or better yet, get your name on the back of someone’s book.
Last year, finding myself a brand new homeowner with no income (a combo I don’t recommend), I put an ad on Craigslist offering my services as a typist and proofreader. My typing skills are not what they used to be (the results of my best test were 85 words per minute), but it’s something I don’t mind doing. And I’ve always had a good eye for mistakes. I was the kid in grade school who, when passed notes in class, would often return them with grammatical and punctuation errors circled in red.
People rarely passed me notes more than once.
Amazing things can happen on Craigslist. I once posted an ad for a guitar I wanted to sell. The ad went up about 4:00 p.m. and by 8:30 I was 70 bucks richer and had one less thing in my office to dust. As for using it to find freelance projects, I’ve been very lucky, getting fairly steady work when I wanted it and developing a client base that included several regulars who continued to offer me work even when I didn’t want it. (Yes, I still did the work. Never look a gift cow in the eye. Or whatever that expression is.)
The worst gig I did last year was transcribing hours and hours of interviews with American women who, for some unknown reason that was never explained to me, chose to walk around wearing niquabs as an experiment. The job took me forever, and staying awake was a real challenge. Worst of all, the guy who hired me disappeared, and I never got paid. (Mr. Murderosa, if you’re reading this, I’ve still got the Word docs and will honor my original quote plus 40 percent.)
One of the coolest gigs I got via Craigslist was proofreading the manuscript that became the novel Stone Dance. The author was a nice guy named Jamie Johnson. I did two passes of the book (an exaggerated parable of the 9/11 tragedy that I thought taught a valuable moral lesson), and I was even asked to give a quote for the back.
Jamie and I recently rendezvoused at our usual meeting place (a coffee house in West Hollywood) and he gave me a copy of the book.
