So the other day my brother who works in the games industry informed me of a truly excellent freelancing opportunity. To rewrite and produce copy for Eurogamer, a well established computer games magazine. Score! I thought and quickly contacted who I needed to.
Unofortunately when I recieved my instructions a wave of panic swept over me. The instructions in the email were long and riddled with mistakes, I read the email a good 5 times and I still didn't really understand what i was meant to be doing. I felt truly stupid, horribly under prepared and overwhelmed.
I finally mustered enough courage to email my potential employer back pleading for clearer instructions. All I could see in my head was this image of her reading the email, laughing and never contacting me again. Fortunately to my surprise she was very understanding and gave me the instructions I needed.
However my problems did not end there. when you write for any sort of established publication, be it a glossy magazine or constructing copy for a leaflet, the same questions and doubt enter my mind, Is my writing good enough?
I found myself writing sentences 3 to 4 times until I was satisfied with them and what made the situation worse is that my target audience is 8 to 12 year olds. Kids have incredibly low attetnion spans and pretty much everything in the world seems more intersting to them than sitting down and reading. This only made things worse, after a year and a half of writing academic writing and learning to make sentences 3 times longer than they should be I had to strip away everything I have learned.
It's taken me 2 weeks to finish it but I will not send it away before its been under the professional scrutiny of my lecturers. It was this event that spurred me on to take this whole blogging business a bit more seriously, hopefully the more I write the better I will get.
So yeah freelancing, testing times.
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