Freelancing Things

[deirdre]

Filter: friends.

I may be ready to make a more public announcement soon, but for now this is friends-only.

I was working a job at Apple that doesn’t translate well into getting a new job despite having great references. To give you a sense of what I did at Apple: it was my job to get all the incoming Safari bugs and triage them: to determine if it was a bug, if it was an Apple bug, whether it was a regression. That meant familiarity and analysis (but not writing) of a hell of a lot of code.

I was awkwardly in between QA and Software Engineering in a job that’s both and yet neither. Because I wasn’t spending my days writing code, I’m not getting the code-writing gigs. Because I wasn’t spending my days writing and executing test plans, I’m not getting the jobs doing that.

What this means is that I’m getting fewer interviews than I’d like and no offers.

Plus, Congress is sucking hard right now on unemployment benefits issues and, well, I’m afraid.

So, here’s the kind of stuff I’m freelancing on:

1. Book covers. I’m not an illustrator, but there’s always the wild wonderful world of stock art to make up any deficiencies. I do have a design background, though. You probably didn’t know I used to do traditional paste-up and burn plates and stuff back in the day when there still was a typographer’s union. Well, I did. Not all day, granted, it was just one of the parts of my job.

2. Graphic and layout things. Business cards. Bookmarks. I’m not a logo designer, though, that requires actual skill with things like Illustrator. Look, I own a copy of Illustrator and maybe it and I will actually finally stop arguing. Don’t hold your breath, my first copy of Illustrator was Illustrator ’88.

3. Interior book design. Which I’d actually done before. Paperback or hardback, with or without cover design. Lots of photos or none. (I use InDesign for this.)

4. WordPress stuff. Setting up sites. Tuning themes, installing plugins, installing security updates, backing stuff up, creating child themes. Been doing this for years, both for myself and (for several years, but not recently) for BayCon.

5. Likewise for other kinds of sites. Still on iWeb? I can help.

6. Miscellaneous writer-y things.

7. Travel writing. Duh. I may actually have a couple of recurring gigs on this soon.

Don’t think I’m looking for big jobs—I’m actually looking for anything. Here’s my Elance profile. And here’s my 99Designs profile. If you happen to know someone who’s got a job upcoming on one of those, if they could invite me (or give me a heads up) to get a chance to bid the job, that’d be great.

If you hear of other freelance stuff, I’d appreciate it if you’d think of me and let me know.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.