“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”- Lewis Carroll

In the end, I lost two working days, $25, and risked some bad feedback from an upset buyer. It started well enough…

The job posting was to ghost a hundred page e-book. More details came after an inquiry: The buyer already had most of the book done; he just wanted a rewrite. He said he was a writer himself and proudly pointed to a web page he’d written. His only problem was not having enough time to ‘tweak’ his e-book. Fair enough. I’m in.

An easy job starts to go downhill.

He touted it as an ‘easy job’ (don’t they always say that?) and sent me his first draft. There was a lot of material, and it wasn’t badly written, so I sent a letter of understanding to finalize the project and got to work. So far, as common as plastic ware.

Ah, but then I sent him my proposed table of contents and part of a chapter to get some feedback. “Oh,” he writes, “I sent you the wrong draft.”

“That part was already done by the first writer.”

First writer? And he then sends me a new draft. Again, the term ‘rewrite’ is mentioned. And, hey, there’s even more material in this version anyhow. Less for me to write. Sometimes the gods of writing smile on you.

No worries. Back to work.

I reviewed the forward, introduction and first two chapters. I rephrased here and there, added some paragraphs where things weren’t that clear– a couple of thousand words or so. The first writer had done a decent job and most of the text was fine as written. Maybe this was an ‘easy job’. But sometimes the gods of writing only look like they are smiling– when they are really smirking.

Things go horribly wrong.

With the initial misunderstanding, it’s two weeks into the project now. I sent off what was completed so far, along with some suggestions for an appendix…

“It’s all wrong”, was the reply.

“You can’t use any of the material I sent; I copied that from the Internet. You have to rewrite it.”

Oh boy. He’s a writer. I’m a writer. No communication.

Man or machine?

The descriptive ‘rewrite’ when I use it, means to correct, fix awkward phrasing, add or subtract to clarify or make a piece stronger. To him, a rewrite meant completely rewording something.

He had a sort of machine in mind. A machine that took sentences and reordered them. A machine that used synonyms to generate ‘new’ text. From my point of view, delivering new material (from what amounted to internet research) required internalizing the ideas, digesting them, and producing fresh copy. Not darned socks, new footies.

In short, when he said ‘rewrite’, it meant ‘write’.

Suddenly, it was obvious that he wanted some 40,000 words. I had seriously and fatally underbid. I withdrew as politely as I could.

The moral.

Clearly, I get the blame for this fiasco. I didn’t understand exactly what I was supposed to do. I made two false assumptions.

First, I let the amount of money lead me to think the scope of the project matched what I would normally do for that amount. Secondly, I assumed that another writer would understand what I took ‘rewrite’ to mean.

This guy was an amateur copywriter on the side. He wasn’t a freelancer who wrote for a living. There’s a world of difference between those two types of writers.

So, the moral is to question, question, and question until you know for sure and certain what they want– then price accordingly. Oh, and the $25? Turns out that since I canceled the project, I still owe elance their fee. The fee they would have gotten had I completed the project as bid.

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