This, That and The Other Thing: Freelance Edition

You know what's cool? When they pay you to rant about stuff that you'd probably rant about anyway. At least, that's what I get to do over at one of my shopping blogs. As long as I can segue over to a coupon at the end, it's all good. Over there today, I tell the story of what happened last night when Middle Sister was getting ready for her friend's birthday party.

You know what's not cool? Learning a real-life lesson about intellectual property...the hard way. I was hired to write some articles for websites that focus on building a personal brand and developing an "online portfolio." I was asked to provide a biography and a photo. About two weeks after completing those articles, more were requested. I visited the websites to get an idea of other content on the topics I was assigned, and I found one of my articles from the first batch, attributed to someone else who (according to the person who hired me) is a fictional persona. Let it be known that in the future I will be a lot more protective of the copyright on any of my writing, because clearly I cannot claim authorship of those articles for my own online portfolio. Notice the irony there?

That led to a whole big dilemma for me last weekend, culminating in my decision not to do any more work for that group of websites. I was very afraid that I would burn a bridge, because I do have a very good working relationship with the person who hired me to do that and several other projects. Fortunately she was understanding (and as surprised as I was about what happened) and she asked me if I'd like to continue working on future projects with her (yay!)

It was a tough couple of days, but my husband and kids stood behind me and encouraged me not to work for someone who would put a different person's name on my articles even if it meant a loss of business. And once I sent out that email explaining why I would not do more work for that website group, I felt so good. I knew I had made the right decision and was so happy to learn that I have not burned a bridge when it comes to other projects.

Guess What!

I totally forgot to talk about this, and I really should have said something TWO WEEKS AGO when it first happened, but I am one of a bunch of new contributors to the "Tech Talk" daily feature at CatholicMom.com!  (How cool is THAT?) 


I'll be writing every other Tuesday about techie topics that are near and dear to my heart as a Catholic, a mom, a Secular Franciscan, a parent of teenagers...


I never considered myself a "Techie," though I suppose the signs were all there.  My younger brother got a computer when I was in high school (a Radio Shack TRS-80, and if you're old enough to know what that is, you're close to my age).  I used that computer as much as he did, learning to write BASIC programs that would print my name 50 times and other useful things like that.  Senior year, I suffered through a half-year of trigonometry so I could enjoy a half-year computer class.  Never popular, I suddenly found myself in demand as students teamed up to work on projects and I was one of the few who knew how to make a computer print my name 50 times.


There wasn't much wiggle room in college for me to take electives, but I took Intro to BASIC as my math requirement (more making computers print my name 50 times) and found room for a one-credit course on computer applications in education.


After two years of teaching, my career path took a turn for the educational-software industry, where I was paid to break software and tell non-English-speaking programmers what I did to break it so they could make the software student-proof.  (I rocked at that job.)  Eventually I freelanced for that company as a software author, writing lesson "scripts."


Down the road, I learned about Internet message boards, blogging, Facebook, Twitter and more.  My husband (who's been a computer programmer since 1995) has kept me in gadgets starting with my very first Palm PDA up through a Kindle, iPad and iPhone.


I enjoy using technology in a variety of ways and look forward to sharing my favorite apps, websites and more, every other Tuesday at CatholicMom.com.  I also look forward to reading what the rest of the "Tech Talk" team shares, and am extremely grateful for this opportunity.


Today's feature is Digital Prayer, in which I talk about the apps you can use to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

Grammatically (In)correct

Middle Sister is working on a school report for music class--a biography of Billie Holiday.

Since my degree is in English, my children take advantage of Mom's Editing Service before turning in their reports. I show them where they need to fix spelling, punctuation or sentence fragments, and sometimes point out spots where something seems to be missing.

Last night she left a draft of her report at my desk, and this morning she looked at it and complained.

"Why can't I say it this way?"

"It's a sentence fragment if you say it that way. Read it out loud."

"....Oh, yeah. It is. But I don't like it the way you fixed it. It's more boring that way!"

Apparently sentence fragments give sixth-grade papers that little extra something. I hope her literature teacher doesn't introduce e. e. cummings to the class anytime soon, or she'll stop using capital letters too.