Writing hard...or hardly writing?

It's been harder than I expected to write with Michael around, even now that he's doing more on his own. I didn't get very much done yesterday. Tonight or early tomorrow I have to turn in my weekly work for a writing gig, so I'm playing catch-up right now. I also have some bigger articles that I have yet to get to. I might have to lock myself into the study for a few hours tomorrow in order to get any decent amount of work done.

I have, however, been working quite a bit on hunting for new gigs and sending off resumes, so I guess all my time is not wasted. Part of that time has been dealing with potential scammers. Speaking of which, Angela Hoy has a very useful article in this week's issue of Writer's Weekly, on warning signs that an ad for freelance work may be trouble.

Interestingly, just a day or two before the weekly ezine came out, I was going to send her an email about Suite101.com. I didn't know about the site's long history, and I wasn't sure if she already knew about it. I should have figured she would. Anyway, I almost fell into Suite101.com's trap: I applied in response to an ad they ran, and even exchanged an email or two with the contact before I read the fine print and realized they were paying per 1000 hits on your article. Now, I happen to agree with Angela Hoy that pay-per-click sites are bad news for freelancers. As she has said many times, writing is a profession, just like anything else, and writers should be paid the same as any other professional. As I told my contact at Suite101.com, you wouldn't pay your plumber a fraction of a penny for every time you flush your toilet after he works on it; you pay for the work itself, and writers should be treated with the same respect.

I also have been following Writer's Weekly's column, "Whispers and Warnings," particularly the bit about Dragonfire. When Writer's Weekly first ran a blurb about them as a paying market, I sent them some of my work, which they (fortunately, now, it seems) were not interested in. Now it appears Dragonfire is not paying their writers. If anyone else has had problems with Dragonfire, by all means, check in with Writer's Weekly - they'd no doubt love to know, and might even be able to help!

One other interesting tidbit for writers - check out the new web comic for writers, Will Write for Chocolate. Pretty funny, and all too true! The same writer posts My Life in a Nutshell, a web comic about various life-inspired topics, and Inkygirl, a blog containing freelance job postings. I'd recommend these sites to any writer.