Hi, my name is Dave and I’m a freelancer.

I’m also a stay-at-home Dad and a coffee addict. However, in this blog I’m going to focus on freelancing and subcontracting rather than parenting and coffee.

To start with, I’m a writer. I’ve thought of myself that way almost as long as I can remember. I wrote stories and poetry in high school (most of it bad), and wrote the comic strip and a regular column for my college newspaper. Afterwards I started submitting fiction to various magazines, without success, and got involved in a few start-ups. I wrote the rules for a role-playing/board game combo that never made it to production (though I did get paid), and also a movie script on spec for a film school.

But that wasn’t really freelancing; that followed later.

I really started freelancing about ten years ago when I discovered a friend of mine was writing computer game reviews for a website called the Apollo Guide, which was primarily a movie review site that was branching out into games. I did some game reviews for them, and when they shut down the game review experiment I tried going into movie reviews but was less successful. After that I focused on fiction for a while, writing a couple of as-yet unpublished novels. The problem with fiction is that either one writes short fiction and has to deal with payment rates that have pretty much remained frozen since 1937 or write novels and accept that it can take years to get paid for your work.

Enough ancient history.

Fast forward to last year, I’m sitting at home working on fiction and taking care of the kids and not being the breadwinner. The budget says we need more money, and a friend of ours mentions a website called oDesk. Curious, I went there, poked around and signed up.

The rest is modern history.

Here’s a list of some of the jobs I’ve done since signing with oDesk. While I didn’t get all of them through the site, I don’t think I would have got any of them if I hadn’t found oDesk first.

• Forum postings on childbirth issues.
• Writing a study of the e-book market.
• Rewriting press releases into short articles.
• Writing tips on various subjects.
• Ghostwriting a novel.
• Writing a short e-book on health matters.

There’s more, including some stuff I’m still working on putting together, but the important thing is that it all adds up to make at least a decent second income, and I can do the work at home in my pajamas if I like.

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