Writing career report, then a character sketch.

Before getting into today's writing exercise, I am supposed to report on my writing of late. As regular reader(s?) know, (thanks Aunt Edna!) I recently re-tooled this blog so that it could function as both a way for me remain accountable and keep readers in the loop, as well as a place for me to do some writing exercises.

So my recent writing has been rather substantial. Back on March 12th, I received an e-mail from an acquaintance/colleague with whom I had worked as an ESL teacher for BYU. She had moved on from the intensive English program we both taught at to become the ESL director for a local company that creates literacy software.

Now this next bit is a testimonial as to why you want to constantly be trying to expand your network when you're a freelancer.

So last year, probably in October or November or something, I had gone to a local ESL association's conference in St. George. It happened that this acquaintance, we'll call her Jane to protect the innocent, was the president of this association and she was there. I knew what she was involved with, so I mentioned to her that I was working as a freelance writer and that my services were always available if she needed them.

Since this is a basically linear story with a set-up that lends itself to a particular pay-off, you can no doubt figure out what this e-mail of the 13th was about. Turns out 'Jane' was in a bind and she needed 30 expository pieces by the end of the month. That's right, in 18 days, 16 if you count me as starting on Monday the 16th.

The pieces needed to be roughly 900 words long. I had topics approved by the 18th. I don't write on Sunday because it's the Sabbath and I don't write on Saturday very much because I usually don't have time.

Oh, and we went to Kanab for three days last week.

Added up, that means I had eight regular work days to write 27,000 words. And do the research for the topics. And do language analysis for each piece.

I got it done with some late nights and the lovely research etc. help of my awesome wife. So that's what my writing career has consisted of for the last two weeks. I also wrote about four or five articles for http://www.helium.com/, one of which I will link to in a new post.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing on writing for the past little while. No real novel writing lately, but that's what the next post is about. This post got too long, so my character sketch is in the next one!