Sunflower Powers Thru

The Inevitable Mark

I don't think it's possible to do writing for the public, and not have something backfire in your face. I expected this would happened eventually. I'm debating whether to do anything about it or not.

I've gotten 3 jobs through being signed up at Writerlance.com. I'm not crazy about their commissions practices, but I've been with them for some time now and found a couple of successful projects that I completed. Then, there's the one left over from last weekend--that I didn't finish.

At some point I realized I had too much information to organize into a 10 page paper. There were flaws in the thesis, and this student hadn't researched enough to realize wheat he was asking me to do. You can't judge the financial impact of gambling on the US without understanding how the system works on an international basis. Not having much e-gambling experience, there were big gaps in my knowledge. He thought I could work through any gaps, but that's not the way you build an essay.

I printed over 100 pages of scholarly resource material from universities and journals when I sat down to draft: I'd done that much reading. He had 10 sections to fill with info for his paper. It was kind of a weird format to begin with. He wanted a section called literature summary, as well as a works cited page. The further in I got, the more overwhelmed I was. My brain was so overloaded by Sunday night, I couldn't think straight. Too much academic input in a short time.

By last Sunday, 10 days--2 weeks into working on this, and the MANY hours of work I invested, I realized I couldn't deliver what the client wanted. I couldn't even force some kind of fit. I'd draft a section, read it, and trash it. I did that at least 6 hours. Somewhere between writing block and this ain't right, I got really hung up and could not produce text any more, at all. It's the first time I ever abandoned an assignment. He rated my performance at my Writerlance profile.

The client is tremendously upset, of course, but I'm not all that sympathetic to his situation. Because I didn't compose his final exam, he ended up failing the course. He went freelance writer hunting a good month ago. If he'd invested any effort in his own assignment, I feel like something might have been salvaged. He didn't know what he needed so he couldn't help me through being stuck.

I didn't get paid, and he didn't pass his business English class, sophomore level. When I wrote him last, I suggested he consider being responsible for working on his own assignments, just in case capitalism and free enterprise didn't work out for him.. I couldn't resist. I never would have trusted anyone to create any of my college assignments, but I'm not like some people, obviously.

I don't have a problem in supplementing a student's work by ghostwriting a moderately important assignment. My ethics stretch that far, to benefit my income potential. But this spring I've had two clients of an ESL nature that fully expected me to produce their final exam for them. It ended up being a learning experience for me too.

Anyhow, Mr. Gupte, my Internet Gambling History paper person, gave me a rating of 2/10 at my Writerlance profile. Two other clients have been satisfied with my work, but they didn't rate me at the site. I guess if it's important, I can ask them to go put some data to up my average number of stars. I'm more likely to cancel the account, and go to another service. By now I've identified 3 project posting sites that I could bid through.

It's just that I got that mark. The goof up is part of my profile. If karma works out in the universe, I don't feel like I need to worry about it. I still have 2 clients with repeat business that I need to send articles in to. My Australian born boss who lives in Malaysia sent me a 40 page e-book to spin. That's got me occupied now.

There are lots of different software programs that claim to aid in spinning articles, but I'm not investing a bunch of time or money in them. I have a couple of little programs that generate additional keywords, and that can be useful. Mostly what I'm doing is just pencil and paper rewriting. As long as the book text reads with people in mind, and search engines secondary, I don't think I need software to think for me.

Freeelancing seems to consisit of having many projects that are due right now, or looking for someone with a project to bid on. I'll leave a link to writerlance, and would appreciate any thoughts anyone would want to share. It's lonely when you've been told to stick your nose in the corner

http://www.writerlance.com/cgi-bin/lance/r.cgi?patrice75214