Come on over and chat about part-time freelancing. Share your ideas, ask questions, post jobs (or pick up some work)… get involved and get half-hogging!

¹ She’s lovely, actually. Awesome talent available on Elance these days!

No, I'm not going to sing.

Instead, this is link love for the people I follow, the people I admire and the talents I aspire to, out there in interwebnetland. They are bloggers, Tweeters or just folks I have been lucky enough to run into somehow. Click through and see why.

She of the carpet shampoo

Kate writes her blog at Itisi and also produces content for a bunch of clients like Danger Here (a football thing). She knows all about WordPress and is also a graphic designer, but is so modest you’d never know how talented she is until someone tells you. She wields carpet shampoo in times of aggression and flings chips with frightening accuracy. Above all, she always makes me laugh: I wish I had her way with words when it comes to humour.

I don’t remember exactly how I found this application, though I believe it was someone on Twitter who pointed to it. Regardless of the source, it’s something any budding novelist should examine. For that matter, it would work for almost any written project, just by redefining some of the terms in your head.

Storybook is an open source novel-writing app. For the non-technical writers, that means it’s a free download. It works in fourteen languages and will run on both Microsoft and Linux operating systems (specifically XP, Vista, SuSE and Red Hat).

The program itself is basically an organiser. You define your book as the biggest ‘container’, which holds chapters, which hold scenes. Each scene has characters assigned to it and a free-form box to type in notes, ideas or even the actual finished text. By building each scene, placing it in the correct chapter and in order with other scenes, you build up your book piece by piece until it’s finished.

It’ll track characters, link between story strands, spell-check and also allow you to maintain a task list (so it’ll whip you into action!).

I only downloaded it last week myself, so I haven’t had a chance to use it much, but it’s already managed to put a few of my ideas into order much better than I could ever have done on paper. I’ve only touched on some of the basics, too – it has advanced features for exporting, charting (“who’s where, when?” – brilliant idea!)  and even doing one-click backups.

I must say I’m pretty impressed. It’s like having a friendly assistant who prods you to organise yourself a bit better – and thus helps release creativity by taking care of the mundane tasks.

Definitely recommended. You can grab it from the home page. Did I mention it’s free?

Some of the others are even about business, if they touch on aspects that are interesting – like SBO, which is not only informative, but also hilarious a lot of the time, particularly in the comments. It’s also mercifully free of buzzwords and manager-speak most of the time.

One thing I have noticed on a lot of freelancing and writing sites is that a great deal of the advice comes from people who are successful. This is the point where you say “Duh!” because advice from unsuccessful people wouldn’t be very useful.

What I mean is that the majority of these people are really successful. They’re published authors, have won awards, hold highly-paid writing positions at funky companies, maintain wildly popular blogs or have their own business that provides them with a six-figure income (although they may have to count the decimals for that).

And that’s all very fine and good, but it does mean that a lot of the information is what I would call “inspirational”. You know, like those business conferences where inordinately rich (and generally puffed-up) entrepreneurs go on about releasing your inner worth, converting by inverting and other such buzzword nonsense. It also means that a lot of the advice is really generic and vague, especially when it comes to questions that might induce legal problems if a visitor were to take that advice as fact.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with inspirational posts if you need a bit of a morale boost, but when it comes down to it, it’s fluff. It doesn’t actually help you do anything.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not demeaning the blogs or their authors. I’m just saying that, if you’re looking for practical, reliable advice, it’s very hard to find. Especially if you’re not a reasonably successful freelancer already, but are still floundering at the “breaking in” stage.

And that’s why (he says, finally getting to the point), this post by Shack is so darned cool. Not only is it an absolutely enormous list of tips, thus ensuring that at least some are useful for everyone, but it’s practical. It’s actually something that helps, even if you’re a total noob.

It has also inspired me (yes, it’s inspirational at the same time) to make a new rule for myself: that every post on ScrawlBug shall include something practical to help fellow writers and freelancers. Even if it’s only the news that Sainsbury’s scotch eggs are cheaper than the ones at Somerfield and taste just as good.

Go and read that post now, bookmark it and thank Shack for it. Practical advice is far too rare.

The big difference here is that Scribophile is not run by a publishing house. It’s a social thing, with lots of writers of all kinds reading, critiquing each other’s work, sharing ideas and the usual nonsense in the forums. Consequently, there’s less pressure on the people posting their work: there’s also less possibility of it being picked up for publishing, but that’s the trade-off.

I’ve spent some time on there today, having a look around, and it seems really friendly. There’s some great stuff available to read, the work-posting options cover the problems of copyrights nicely and it seems to be a fairly active community.

If you’re a bit put off by Authonomy’s publisher tie-ins and just want to share your work with other amateurs (and professionals, but in a more social setting), it might be a good choice.

I shall be going back, I think. We ‘philes should stick together. And not because someone spilled glue on us.

[Originally posted at www.wordophilia.com]