Freelancer Blues Part 3

Here we are at the third installment of our aesthetically-unappealing-on-purpose look at the highs and lows of trying to write about games for gelt. I hope that you have a six pack handy, because today is all about sadness, horror, and maybe reading a blog while you're drunk (if you read slowly).

MYTH-SQUASHING REALITY OF THE DAY

You need to have a job.

There.

It doesn't have to be a high-paying job, or even a full-time job, really, but a job is a job, and if you're writing for a gaming website or two, then an actual, stable stream of income outside of that is pretty important, especially if this is the only thing keeping your gas turned on. Let's say that you turn out to be a pretty good writer. You've gotten a fair enough amount of experience and have put together a half-decent set of samples that you've parlayed into a relationship at Gaming Site A (because calling it Gaming Site X implies that it should be snowboarding). This means that they are paying you a flat rate for each individual piece that you write. This is just an example, but think they're giving you about $150/ article if you're writing a feature or review, though that might vary depending on the size of the feature, the work involved, and necessary research (there are pretty similar criteria for reviews). Let's do some simple math: if you score one article per week (which is pretty darn good sometimes), that's roughly $600-750 a month depending on the month, what the site needs, and if you're reliable and fast. That's a pretty good chunk of change all things considered, but how much is your rent? You're food? Are you paying for internet, or do you have to live in a coffee shop, and even then, that's a couple bucks here and there for their mediocre dark roast so they don't kick you out. Do you have roommates? Insurance? Other things that your parents are really concerned about and you, maybe not so much?

The consistency of the work you're getting is going to turn out to be monumentally important. HORROR STORY: Remember my friend Brian? Good guy, great writer. He used to be one of the news guys for a larger site when they were relying on freelancers to publish a certain amount of articles a day. It wasn't great cash, but it was consistent, and with the other work that Brian was pulling in, he could make ends meet (Brian also has a wife and newborn, by the way). All of a sudden, the website did some rejiggering with their staff and he wasn't on the news anymore. This severely threw a wrench into Brian's day-to-day affairs and what he was bringing in every month. Brian wound up being ok, he had other freelance clients to fall back on (Bonus ProTip: diversify your clients if you can swing it), but there isn't an umbrella in the world that will cover you when the shit comes down. Editors will come and go, and this might change your relationship with a company. My advice is to at least try to work at this coffee shop you've been playing Phantasy Star II in. You'll be making tips and keeping yourself fed with their day-old bagels, and if anything, they won't kick you out when you've been sitting there for five hours mooching their free wi-fi.

MANAGE YOUR TIME. THIS IS NOT AN OPTION.

This might sound completely contradictory to what I just told you about keeping steady work in- and out of the games writing bidness, but once you start getting down with reviews and features on the regular you will soon struggle with this as I (and many others) have. I'll cut to the chase: You're not going to have a lot of time to turn around an article after it has been offered to you by an editor. The most you might get is about 4 days (more or less) to put together a feature if the place you're writing for is thinking ahead with their content plans (and that's pretty generous in some instances). That's kind of a lot of time, but that can depend on your situation. Let's say you have a 25-page slide show that you need to write 75-100 words apiece for, plus finding all of the art for them, resizing them and/or Photoshopping or GIMPing something for them (plus intro and extro slides), and this assumes that your editors have given the list of games to you and not relied on you to think them up yourself (and then send them prior to writing for approval). If you did this and nothing but this, then it might take you a few hours or even a day to kind of pound something out. The rest of us have a lot of other stuff going on, so they have to compartmentalize and prioritize their time a little differently.

With reviews, sites want to publish their thoughts on something as close as humanly possible to the release of the game that they can pull off. Sure, sometimes this works and other times it doesn't, but getting things finished, and finished correctly, at a deadline is what they're hiring you to do. That means that if you're getting a review, you have to drop everything that you're doing and begin inhaling whatever they sent you. This can be very stressful. Most of the time, it's only about 2-3 days between getting a download code and having the work published, so you have to be not only quick on your feet, but also decisive with your judgments. But a lot of times, that even gets thrown out the window depending on the game. When you are offered a random twin-stick shooter exclusive for XBLA or something like DLC for Skyrim, that potentially pedestrian twin-stick shooter is going to be a hell of a lot easier to soak up and accurately review in the time you'll be allotted. But I know, you really want to review Skyrim DLC. We'll come back to that.

I have a full-time job, and there have been plenty of times that my lunch hour is taken up sitting in front of my laptop either transcribing notes and forming them into complete thoughts or screwing around on Google Images trying to get art together because the ftp password that came with press credentials isn't working and I can't get pictures for an article. There have been times where I do this during the day, play games at night to review, and then repeat the process until it's done. It ain't always like this, but it happens. One more thing: It might be tempting to try to do some of this stuff at work, but try to be disciplined with it. No need to screw it up with the people that might be paying for your insurance, whether you like the gig or not.

This brings up the subject of playing games for enjoyment, which you will want to do. Well, I can't tell you what you should and shouldn't do with your free time, but trying to squeeze all of this stuff together -- writing your articles, playing shitty games for review (we'll come back to this, too), proofing, making more contacts, living an actual life -- it can get a little difficult sometimes to just, well, play games that you want to play. Way back when on an episode of the Oddcast, Chris Plante pretty much came right out and said that it doesn't happen very often if you’re trying to be a good writer. The more you do this, and the more the work comes in, the more you might find that he's right.

To sum up, don't quit your day job. For real. I hope you can get to a point where you're turning down work because you're over cooked with what you have, or that you're just been offered a staff writing gig at your favorite shop. Until then, though, keep this as a really great hobby, and just do good work.

ENOUGH PREACHING

I promised terror, and terror I will bring. Here are some brief anecdotes of things that happened whether they could have been avoided or not.

- Remember when I told you not to pack your bags so you could make it in New York? Well, this might be the most practical advice I can give you because I once met a guy that, yes, packed up his shit because he had a job at Game Site A in a city far from where he was. He got there, unpacked his stuff, and was downsized within three months. Most of the time you can't see this coming, but still. Be careful, man.

- You are hired to write something for someone, and it will almost never be something of profound interest to you, in my experience. Maybe you have a really great article in mind about the state of achievement in games, or how gamers themselves stereotype each other based on what games they're playing. Tough cookies. Give us 10 slides about Lara Croft's chest. Yes, you write for hire, not always for art.

- When you are writing something on the internet, you must prepare for a certain decimation of your ego. Brian has done articles for sites that were very large, had a copious research component, and paid kind of lousy when all things were said and done. His real reward were the 4 people out of around maybe 70 that commented on the article he wrote (that wasn't even his idea) that didn't call him an idiot, a bad writer, or a thousand times worse. The thing with the internet is that everyone has a voice, and they will use it to yell at you no matter how well-intentioned you are. From Brian's own [typed] lips: "internet commenters exist to a) point out every last typo, b) pull up some obscure fact that invalidates yours, or c) generally make you feel that the article you wrote kills puppies." I can site more articles than you have the time or patience to digest as proof. Thicken your skin, son.

- My first routinely-paying work was doing news for a site that expected you to find something online, pitch it to them, and then turn it around to them in less than 30 minutes. It was a great learning experience, and I still keep in touch with the editor. The bad thing is that this guy was fired about 8 months or so after I started. They kept the same schedule for news, but started giving it only to certain freelancers without pitching, and they did this without really telling anybody. This was their call, and while I was a little let down that I wasn't in on the plan, I had to remember that I was still working for hire, so I didn't really need to be. Surprise, doing news was a thing of the past.

- I've visited the home offices of one larger site in the past, and it was creepily silent. These places are not club houses where everyone's playing Halo. This is a business.

- Putting up with shitty assignments will reward you with getting exactly what you want when you want it, but very rarely.

- Editors are really, really busy. As such, they don't have a ton of time to give you feedback or offer you constructive criticism. When they do, sponge it all in.

- On the flip side, other editors will pass your work around the office to give everyone a read and then send you thoughts via Google document or maybe even a .doc file. Chances are, that masterpiece you wrote just got brutalized by someone. Try not to take it personally. If errors are particularly eggregious, you might make a short apology after you do the rewrites, but just do the rewrites quickly and correctly if you have that chance.

- Of the above two examples, the worst thing in the world is when a writing team will take your work and rewrite it to put in their own humor or attempt to "fix" things. I made a large slide show for a site once that was supposed to be funny, but the editors clearly didn't get the jokes that I was making. After sending it back to me for some rewrites, they went ahead and did their own share of rewriting while completely restructuring the slide show. Some jokes fell flat because of their new placement, others made absolutely no sense because of retooling, while others had added text to slides that made them...icky. My name was attached to this, so I was a bit furious, but there really isn't anything I could do. Either I complain and risk loosing them as a client or hope that the article gets burried as soon as possible. Thankfully, the latter happened.

- The games that you will get for review will be, for the most part, small-time. This, in no way, implies that you're writing about bad stuff, but places have in-house staff to review the Final Fantasies, BioShocks, and Mass Effects. When pitching to editors and asking for games to review, keep in mind the smaller and mid-tier games that come out as downloadables or for niche audiences. A lot of times, places don't have enough man power to get to that stuff.

- This was sort of my fault, but one time a game got announced to release on PSN two or three days before it actually dropped. I emailed the reviews editor for a site to see if I could write up the review for it right when the news broke, but he was out of the office. Thinking I was being pro-active, I sent a message to his managing editor explaining the situation and asking for the review. This person saw it my way and sent me a download code a day later (thankfully giving me until the day after the game's release as a deadline). Going over the original editor's head didn't do me any favors, though, as he proceeded to give me the cold shoulder for close to 8 months. I didn't get review work from this place again until he left for another opportunity.

- If you don't calmly remind certain places, you might not get paid for months at a time. I wish this wasn't the case, but always make sure that you send your invoices and your follow-up emails in a timely manner.

I hope this was helpful for, well, someone. I'm sure I'll remember a little tidbit that I left out and will blog about it when it comes to mind.

Thanks for reading the Long Stuff (because people hate the Long Stuff).