The New Normal

We all know what's going on. It's not a great situation for anyone, and it's something that none of us have had to deal with before. The weird thing is that although I see globally daily life is being upended, I woke up today and did the exact same things I always do, keeping the exact same schedule. I've been working from home for most of my professional life. I feel weird that nothing changed, but I am very glad that it hasn't.

There are a lot of things that I could say about this pandemic, but I'll try to be brief and focus on the important topics that impact full-time writers like myself (and graphic designers, artists, web designers, and other freelancers in those creative spaces).

Don't Leave The Gig Economy Behind

There is a lot of talk--even proposed legislation--that will try and ease the pain of people who can no longer go to work and cannot work from home. There are provisions for employees and small businesses. Large corporations will even probably end up with a few dollars lining their deep pockets. But nothing yet has addressed the gig economy, of which many like myself belong. I would benefit from none of the proposed assistance so far. Luckily at the moment, I don't need it. No clients have cut ties, no freelancing platforms I use have had a significant drop in available work. But the longer this has to go on, the greater the chance people will stop using freelancers, because when the corporations don't hire out to small businesses, small businesses don't hire freelancers.

There are people looking out for us. This is a portion of the message sent out by the Freelancers Union yesterday:

However, if you know about this organization, you know it is New York-based and does a lot of great work to balance the scales for freelancers... in New York. They don't have a huge national impact, so it's hard to see what they can do for the gig economy outside of that state, unless they are part of the voice that advocates to Washington.

Even Mitt Romney is proposing a Yang-like solution. This is the only way that assistance could reach everyone who may need it (including freelancers), and I would support a move like this if daily life stayed interrupted for more than a month. But if you think about it for just a moment, there's no clear way of distribution without hiccups. How do you deliver this kind of aid? Does the government cut checks? Collect bank account information for those who want the payout? What databases do they access to get names and addresses without leaving anyone out? There are a lot of questions that solution would bring up. 

The key takeaway is for the businesses that hire freelancers: if you can keep providing projects, please do so. Remember that freelancers are the ones who already may not have health insurance, get no sick leave if they can't work, and teeter on the edge of financial frustration on a daily basis because they do what they love.

The Local Scene

Because I'm a writer that works from home, social distancing is my jam. I've been unknowingly practicing this for years. Yes, I live in a state that has cases of the virus (I think we all do now). Yes, I live in a county with known cases. As I mentioned earlier, daily life where I live didn't change until last Thursday evening when local school corporations announced closings. By Friday morning (only about 16 hours later) when I went shopping for a non-panic amount of groceries, that's when I saw that other people were panicking. I'm letting the world know that the local panic buyers are now fully stocked on toilet paper, ramen, and canned ravioli. Even though I know I'm taking the right steps to protect myself and those in my immediate social circle, you can't help but question whether you should start getting worried when you see those empty shelves. It's not worry about a virus, it's worry about the actions of others. People are crazy, and no amount of factual information is going to convince a crazy person otherwise.

And About Facebook (or social media in general)...

If you love misinformation, go for it. Delve into your newsfeed and roll around in those sweet, sweet lies. Find out that some of those acquaintances you've had for years are panic-buying and selling individual rolls of TP out of the trunk of their car. Learn which of your friends has completely misinterpreted the latest headlines. Read the faux desperation in your friend's post when they have to spend time with their spouse/children and already cracked open a bottle of wine because of it. Get annoyed by that one person who posts toilet paper memes every fifteen minutes.

Just be careful about what you share--don't be a part of the problem. I haven't been sharing any information, even from verified news sources on any platform because I know people are smart and don't need to hear the information from me. They know where trusted news sources are, and they can easily find those articles themselves. 

It's a new time in this world, but we'll see it through.

NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 2

I don't want to take up a lot of my writing time working on this, so let's just say I'm still in the game. I am totally a lap behind the rest of the pack, but I'm still in it, I'm still working on it. If you haven't been following the daily posts on Patreon (and why not?), here are the posts from the past week:

Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14

Now I'm getting back at it. 50k in the near future? Maybe!


*A Freelancer's sidenote: What's up with all the follows on Medium? On the surface, that's great. I thought I suddenly had a hot title there. Nope. Three follows in two days, zero article views. I see your game. No follow backs from this gal. 

Leaving the Past, Embracing the Future

Things are changing in a big way, and that means there's a bit of nervous electricity in the air. I've already had a mini outburst on social media about this, but here's the deal: a company I have worked for since 2009 is making huge changes, and not the good kind.

Textbroker has been one of my income streams since the beginning. It is what we in the business like to refer to as a content mill--clients who often put keyword stuffing over quality and relatively low pay for writers. There are sometimes huge globally-recognized brands, sure, but you always question why they would come to a website like this in the first place when they could just as easily put together an in-house team.

At the beginning, it was responsible for at least half of my monthly earnings. This has ebbed and flowed over the past ten years, but it was always a place to go when I had no other work to do on a particular day. While all of the other content mills have faded into obscurity or have been replaced by bidding sites (which aren't much better), Textbroker has lasted. Until now.

The company sent an email stating they were changing their payment processing from PayPal to Payoneer. Looking on the website's author forum, many had never heard of Payoneer before. Neither had I. Everything I've researched says that I shouldn't make the switch, especially not just for one company. Since I've had to deal with issues of compromised personal information (big sarcastic thanks to TurboTax, Target, Yahoo, and Equifax, among many others) I'm not in any way comfortable giving personal and financial information to this company.

It's not just the switch--it's the reason for the switch. Textbroker wants to try and prevent writers outside of the U.S. from signing up, and apparently, this payment processor will help with that. Really? This is a big deal because the website promotes only U.S. writers will be working on tasks, even though they have a worldwide client base. Switching to Payoneer does one thing and one thing only--gives foreign clients a better way to pay. Just do a quick Twitter search for Payoneer on Twitter. Most of the tweets singing its praises are in another language. A deep dive into researching shows that Payoneer is also a preferred payment method for international scammers. There are no official stats on this, but come on. It's pretty obvious. Textbroker claims that it is impossible to offer multiple payment options for writers. This, my friends, is a lie. I've been freelancing for over a decade--most websites and companies I have worked for offer multiple payout options.

The sad thing? Some writers on the site want the switch because they hate PayPal. I have never once had an issue with PayPal, so I don't see a reason I should have to change. I sincerely hope it does work out for everyone that makes the switch to Payoneer, but I won't be joining them in 2020.

I keep thinking about that moment where I will have to choose whether to push that "Close Account" button or not. I could sit around and hope they will bring PayPal back, but what I really need to do is leave the past behind. It was a great run, but Textbroker no longer serves my goals and ambitions in a lot of ways.  I don't know what is going to come next without this to fall back on, but what I do know is that I can't let the frustration of it all hold me back. This isn't the first time I've tried to leave Textbroker only to be lured back in, but it will be the last. 2020 is going to be an amazing year for me, so I won't spend another moment worrying about whether I made the right decision.

So long, Textbroker. It's been a wild ride.