Fear of Branding

Well, hey, it's only been close to a year since the last post. I could say I've been busy with work, which I was. I could say I didn't have anything to write about, which would be a lie. (The fact that I now have to dodge Shopzilla's ad for "Vitamins & Nutrition" when I look up the word "ubiquitous" on Webster's, for example, is fodder enough for many chewy posts.) I could throw out that Blogger's spell-check -- which is currently red-flagging "Blogger's" and "spell-check" -- annoys me, but what kind of editor would I be if I paid rapt attention to spell-check?

rapt. 3: wholly absorbed. Brought to you by Zilliant price management software.

Really, though, since I'm not technologically adept enough to fudge the dates on this thing and pretend that I haven't assiduously been ignoring it, I'll have to come clean: my sorry excuse is fear. Fear of adding the two zillionth word that tips the blogosphere into utter inanity. Over-40 fear of new technology. Fear and loathing of self-promotion (buy the Diane brand of editing: cleaner, faster, stronger -- now with 10% more queries in every manuscript!) Fear of typos, danglers, misused usage, repetition, impure thoughts (sometimz i just wanna write w/o havin to wach me grammer and spellin), and badly articulated, poorly styled, meandering, clear-as-mud sentences that don't communicate to my intended audience.

Query: Who is your intended audience and how will you find them if you don't actually tell anyone you're writing this thing? Please elaborate.

But all that has changed. Primarily because right now I am in famine freelancer mode (and my intended audience knows exactly what I mean by this, should I decide to let them in on the secret that is widows & orphans). Now, I've been in famine mode before. I'm a freelancer; it comes with the territory. This time feels different, though. It feels angsty, panicky -- like I should be eating three squares of ramen and collecting pennies on the street. Yes, it's the zeitgeist: my health insurance went up $75 a month, my co-op dues $15; even bus fare has increased. One of my longtime clients just laid off half its staff; another has temporarily discontinued raising rates/paying rush fees. After sometimes having to turn down, refer out, or subcontract work these past few years, I find that I'm rather unprepared for -- gasp! -- a week without a looming deadline. Splash! Some cold water there.

Yet icy liquids also have a salutory effect. Cleansing, bracing, renewing. (I'll have a Grey Goose martini, please: up, extra olives.) Could it be that taking stock of my freelance career might perhaps be a good thing? Check. That finally creating a Facebook page could be, well, fun? Check. That searching for a few new clients may well take me on adventures I could never have imagined? And that mapping those adventures -- and other forays on the sometimes dark and dirty streets of our profession -- with an actual, as opposed to intended, audience might not take me over the flat edge of the world where monsters live? Even with some typos on the map? Check and check.

So here it goes. widows & orphans -- cleaner, faster, stronger! 10% more musings; 20% less angst!! See, I just got branded, and it didn't hurt a bit.