OK, OK, I know it’s a cheap imitation, but too fun not to parody.

For all of you freelancers who toil in your treetop aerie, serenaded by regal raptors, and even for those who might subject their verbs to subjective verbalizations in an old Airstream, you might wonder where your next crust of bread (or better yet, bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve) is coming from. Fret not.

That old series of tubes dubbed the Internet will whisk job listings straight to your screen, so that you can continue to work your magic behind the home keyboard like the great and terrible Oz. You won’t have to go out into society job-hunting, where you might expose those accidental dreadlocks you’ve been cultivating. There are all manner of job sites Netwise, but I’m talking here about listings of writing jobs delivered directly to you—and they have the bonus key lime pie of being wrapped in a writer’s newsletter, full of the newsiness you writerly types are keen on.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Writer’s Weekly – This is the handiwork of Angela Hoy, and it gets around: as stated, “The highest-circulated freelance writing ezine in the world.” Angela sends out a weekly newsletter that has a range of contract job listings for telecommuters of every stripe. The mailing also has her reports about personal travails and triumphs, a lead writing article, warnings on deadbeat publishers and more. On the deadbeat publishers issue, if you contact her about a venue that hasn’t paid you your due, she reports it online in her Whispers and Warnings column, and will write (for free!) a series of letters to the offending party, acting as a liaison between you and the crumbbum who stiffed you. She does get results.

Writing World – Lots of good stuff on the site itself (many helpful articles in the Business of Writing section), and sections on all writing genres—what, no haiku? But I go for the free newsletter, which also has a lead article on the business of writing, a Inquiring Writer column where readers help readers on writing requests and issues, and the Jobs and Opportunities portion, which has freelance work and submissions listings. Delivered twice a month.

Funds for Writers – No, they aren’t just going to dole out dough to you—I already asked. But the free newsletter lists lots of writing grants and retreats, writing contests and job markets. And Hope Clark, the woman who runs the joint, is charming. Her column is personal and always worth the read. Delivered once a week.

I’m also a member of The Writer’s Bridge, a paid site that sends out a daily compendium of job listings from across the U.S., including gleanings from all the major Craig’s Lists. I have gotten a couple of juicy contracts from these listings (though there are some clunkers in there too, as any Craig’s Lister knows). Ten bucks a month, and like I say, every day. Darrell Laurant, the fellow that runs the site, is a long-time journalist, and a good guy.

Sites (and Sights!) Galore
Those are the only sources of writing jobs on the whole Internet. Wait, did I hear you grunt in disdain? OK, true, that isn’t even a quivering bacterium’s ecological cloth grocery bag’s worth (say that ten times, fast) of the job listings for freelancers on the net, but dang, who’s got the time to list them all?

But if you absolutely lust to look at other lists of contract writing work (and associated writing advice and resources), here are a few other job site conglomerates I flip through now and then:

Journalism Jobs

Freelance Writing Jobs Network

About Freelance Writing

Copyediting

If you see anything there about writing songs for lovelorn squirrels, buzz me—I’m a pro.

A friend of mine was in a Borders yesterday looking for a couple of books. She sat down on the carpeted floor in the travel section so she could comfortably pull out a few titles from a low shelf and check them out. A clerk came up and said, “Ma’am, customers are not allowed to sit on the floor.” She asked if he had a chair, and he said she would have to go to the cafe if she wanted to sit down.

They haven’t invented the right profanity for this situation yet, but let me express why it deserves one most sour: These are the days in which bookstores are going down. Amazon, ebooks, self-distribution, shortened attention spans—there are a raft of reasons. In this time when bookstores are at least on the threatened, if not endangered species list, you tell a customer they can’t sit in the store when they are looking at books? Greatgodalmighty!

When I was a kid, one of my greatest delights was to go to the library and surround myself with books I pulled off the shelves. I sat in the aisles for hours sometimes, lost in the world of words. Many years later (and the jobs years apart), I managed a couple of bookstores, even one owned by a corporation. There was no stiff-backed rule about sitting in the aisles—I couldn’t imagine shooing a customer away like that unless they were putting ice-cream cones in the books, or taking Magic Markers to them. Of course, of course, you don’t want your customers literally blocking the aisle, but this wasn’t the case.

Howl of Customer Cruelty
The kicker is that besides looking for a travel book, my friend was looking to buy a copy of Howl, the seminal Allen Ginsberg work. Why Howl? Because one of her clients is a poet. The client is moving to New Orleans, and she wanted to give him a gift. THAT’S customer service. Her customer is leaving, yet she is making him a generous gesture. That’s rising above—not practicing rule-making folly.

Don’t treat your customers like trash in your aisles. Find a connection, not a stiff-stick-up-the-rear rule. Share life’s poetry with them instead.

And for surviving my rant, you get a bonus treat: here is the last paragraph of Sunflower Sutra, one of the selections from Howl. Let’s be sunflowers instead of automaton clerks at bloodless corporations.

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.


I’ve mentioned before how answering HARO (Help A Reporter Out) story queries can result in your blog or business URL getting flapping wings over new waters, and indeed that again was the case for me in answering Lisa Kanarek’s solicitation for hints on stepping away from the home office for her Working Naked blog.

Lisa posted my short answer to her inquiry on her blog yesterday, and I saw this morning, through the magic of Google Analytics, that seven people had traipsed over to my site from hers.

A Lucky Seven
Now you might think that seven people is only a crowded phone booth [Note to self: do people remember what phone booths are?], but I know that even gaining small numbers of folks sifting through the shelves of my site is a good thing, no matter if they are interested in my copywriting services or in seeing if I’ve made a spelling missteak. (And no, I don’t obsess over every traffic footfall in Google Analytics, but it’s an intriguing tool.)

By the way, seeing as how summers in Santa Cruz County, CA are often pretty durn foggy, I never work naked; the heat’s on right now…

It was brought to my attention (I love the phrase, because I envision velvet-liveried footmen bringing a notion—one resting on a purple pillow—to me) that there is a book that takes a studied look at the history of parentheses, their use over the ages, their value as a species, their contributions not only to the literature, but as an aesthetic component of thought.

It is called But I Digress. Not only is this a work of 344 pages, its purchase price is $175. My.

Because I enjoy the employment (though not the moral obligations) of a good pair of parentheses myself, that spurred me to consider how the lovely little tocks and notches of punctuation create a soft side-current in the river of thought, an accent note, like how you might detect a whiff of elderberries in your Cabernet Franc, though its main train to your nostrils is peopled with toffee and raisin bread. Punctuation is the conductor’s wand to the orchestra’s melding of swelling verbal notes.

That got me to mulling over how the use of punctuation in some spare composition—an epitaph, say—might be the axis for delivering meaning. On the subject of epitaphs, writers should always write their own. You could do worse than emulate the sing-song declarativeness of some of the lines in the famed Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch:

He’s pining for a fjord
His metabolic processes are now history
He’s run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible
THIS IS AN EX PARROT!

Categorizing Your Tombstone Tokens
Fine epitaphs, but in regards punctuation, those Pythonesque parrotings are lacking. Consider a few categories:

Friendly – A simple phrase like “Loads o’ fun” works well. The apostrophe indicating the omitted “f” is casual and merry, and bespeaks geniality. What about an Elizabethan elision: O’er teacakes and waistcoats, I did preside

Marketing – Employ the marketer’s cudgel: the exclamation point. Something like Dead! Thoroughly! Special Offer to Repeat Visitors!

Brevity – Though he spoke it, the one-word sign-off for Dan Rather’s news broadcast all but shouted (and because it was one word, also intimately whispered) that the word ended with a full stop: Courage. You could try something like Stewing. Or maybe Ennui.

Needs Answering – And the interrogative ending will surely get your plot’s visitors mulling over meaning: Mind getting me some water? or, Do you know that hat makes you look like a monkey?

Pauses and Ponderings – I like a nice mix of colons and semicolons on a stone: Note to self: I’ll nap here; at some point, I’ll have to do laundry.

Corral Your Word Cattle – And of course we have to visit what prompted this business in the first place, the exalted parenthesis: Keep the peace (and keep your hands off my wife). or Here I lie. (Hey, it’s better than stealing.)

Closing with a Bang
This post is going on a bit, so I’ll wait til later to address that charming, coy curve, the comma; the happy hand-me-the-baton linker, the hyphen; and that dashing fellow—the dash—but I do want to close with a bang: an interrobang, that is.

A combination of the question mark and the exclamation point (dubbed on Wikipedia as a “quesclamation” mark), the bang is implying the asking of a question in a heightened state. Perhaps for an epitaph, something like “Christ, all this and they give me a view of the Safeway‽”

Rest easy, folks. And make sure your punctuation rests with you.