So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer: The Truth About Writing for Pay

Writing for pleasure doesn't exactly pay the bills.

As most of my regular readers already know, I'm a fourth-year university student with tuition and books to pay for, and unfortunately for me, no one is throwing wads of cash at me for my devastatingly witty blog posts each week. 

Pictured: not the average writer's experience.

In order to keep myself in textbooks and wine coolers that my student self so desperately needs, I work as a freelance writer. It's a simple enough way to make money - someone asks me to write something, I write it, they pay me - but every time I mention what I do for a "living", I end up bombarded with disbelieving stares and ceaseless questions. Since most of my friends are at least somewhat literate, those questions are often to the tune of "how do I get started"? Freelance writing may be simple, but the process of starting out is anything but.

So if you're interested in embarking on your own freelance writing adventures, or if you're merely interested in reading about the inconveniences and hardships of the career path in order to bolster your already-immense admiration for me, keep in mind that:

10

Why Books Make the Best Christmas Presents

One more Christmas-themed post, people, and then we return to regular programming until next year. I promise.

No more Christmas posts until you and this anonymous thin woman have shed this year's extra holiday pounds. 

Two weeks ago, I tried to be a kind blog writer and give all of you a head start on your holiday shopping by providing you with a list of wonderfully bizarre and impractical gifts to startle your loved ones with on the big day. 


Just look how happy she is. 

Of course, I have no doubt that the vast majority of my readers didn't take my advice, and now three days before Christmas you're scrambling to find last-minute gifts that won't leave your entire family disappointed in you. Sure, you could go to the mall and stab a random stranger to get your hands on that last trendy handbag or hot holiday toy, but, once again, I've got your back with a much more practical solution.


Just looking at this makes me salivate.

That's right, books are the answer to all your problems. They're affordable, yet classy. They're popular, and yet you're much less likely to get punched in the face at a bookstore than a department store. They provide hours of entertainment, and yet you don't have to have the newest operating system or console to view them. They are, in essence, the perfect gift. 

Of course, picking out the right book can be tricky. Unless everyone on your list has an active Goodreads account, you can't always tell what they've already read, and someone's taste in novels might not always match their taste in movies. But don't let fear of buying the wrong book scare you off. Even if you hand someone a book they'd rather use to prop up a wobbly table with than read, books still make the best presents because:

They make excellent bludgeoning weapons. 

I live on the edge of Alberta's capital region, which means that at any given time, I'm within a reasonable driving distance of a range of deadly predators, including bears, wolverines, bobcats, coyotes, wolves and mountain lions. If sharp-toothed meat-eaters aren't your thing, locals here also have the option of being peacefully trampled to death by herbivorous moose, cattle, big-horned sheep, buffalo, elk or caribou.


This is not a random stock image; this was taken just outside my high school.


It's foolhardy to go up against these animals empty-handed, but defensive weaponry poses a serious problem in the great white north. Running around with a shotgun sticking out of your snowpants will get you a strongly-worded letter from the local RCMP, and harpoon depots are notoriously hard to find in the prairies. Chasing them off with snowballs won't do you any good either. They were born in the snow, molded by it. They didn't see spring until they were already adults. You merely adopted it.

Canada's cultural necessity, the mighty Timbit, unfortunately cannot save you from bears either.

And that's where books come in. They're heavy, they're compact, and they're easy to store. They've got sharp corners for gouging and a full pad of pages for delivering small but deadly papercuts. Bigger is better - fend off Mother Nature's pointiest children with that copy of War and Peace that you'll never get through, or with those copies of the Twilight Saga that your misguided grandmother got you. It doesn't matter what the book is about; so long as you can grab it and start swinging, it's an excellent Christmas gift. 

You can make artful sculptures out of them and put pictures on Pinterest. 

It's not always easy to pick out the perfect book for someone, even if you do know that person's hobbies. What if your painter friend has that book of brush techniques already? Is it condescending to buy a children's 'how to draw' book for the struggling artist in your life? And is it really appropriate to buy the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for your harem of sex slaves?


I'm not doing a Google Image search for that last one.

Luckily for you, there's Pinterest. Pinterest, as you may know, is an online hive of middle-aged supermoms whose sole purpose is to made you feel bad about giving your three-year-old a batch of 'just add water' grocery store cupcakes to smear on himself for his birthday, instead of whipping up a gluten-free masterpiece of fondant, buttercream and surgically precise decorating. 

I dare you to make this without ending up divorced in a psychiatric ward.

Cakes aren't the only thing the denizens of Pinterest invest their copious spare time in; book-based art has quickly become a huge trend. Using just an old book and the contents of an entire art studio, you can produce a trendy, uncycled piece that will finally earn you the coveted re-pins of the Pinterest elite. Unwanted books will mostly likely sit on your shelf forever - why not have them sit there in style?


There


is


a

seemingly

endless

supply

of

this

stuff.

You can even suggest this approach yourself. If your friend unwraps your literary gift and makes a face like you've just handed them a pickled human colon, you can instantly pretend that you've merely gifted them with the raw materials for a beloved Pinterest masterpiece. After all, who doesn't love a gift that you have to make for yourself?

They make superior car fresheners. 

People like their cars to smell nice, for some reason. If you've ever spent any length of time driving around with a sweaty teenage boy or not-so-fresh corpse, you probably understand. Now, for some reason, the gold standard of car freshening comes in the form of a flimsy cardboard tree hung from the rearview mirror. Car freshner manufacturers have begun to make their products available in everything from "fresh mint" to "bacon", but nothing seems to have usurped the popularity of the original 'inside of a wood chipper' scent.

 Nothing unnatural about a wood-scented chunk of bleached lumber pulp.

As long as we're perfuming our cars with tree byproducts, we might as well take advantage of the ultimate paper-based scent: book smell. You know that wonderful musty smell inside a book that makes you light-headed with joy and binding glue fumes? There's no reason you can't take it with you everywhere. 

This exists, but I'm told that open flames are frowned upon in moving vehicles.

If you or a loved one receives a pile of unreadable tripe this Christmas, there's nothing to worry about. Just crack that puppy open to a random page, prop it up against the heat vent, take a deep breath, and enjoy. Seriously, though, drive carefully, because paperback glue apparently spews toxic fumes when it's heated. No need to worry about hardcovers, though - that glue is made from harmless leftover chunks of horses. 

You can add some fibre to your diet.

You're not getting enough fibre in your diet. You're not getting enough calcium, Vitamins A-D, iron, zinc or potassium either. In fact, your entire diet probably consists of nothing but sodium and saturated fat. What did you have for breakfast, fried whale blubber?

Dinner is served.

Until it becomes legal to kidnap and gift-wrap dietitians, there is no one gift you can give that will sort out your loved ones' hopeless, greasy mess of a diet. A good book, however, is a start. Sure, you can load them up with cookbooks, diet books, health books, and carefully bound photographic essays on morbid obesity, but if you think their pudding-based meal schedule has brought their fibre to critically low levels, buy them the worst book you can find and let nature take its course.

Eat up, kids.

Books are chock-full of fibre, and they come pre-sliced into easy-to-eat, easy-to-tear slices for your munching convenience. Their low calorie count won't force you to move up into a larger pair of industrial-strength stretchpants, and their water solubility means that even Grandpa can mush 'em up with his gums. And if someone on your shopping list really takes to eating books, you've potentially got a great episode of My Strange Addiction on your hands. 

That concludes this year's Christmas blog posts! Leave your thoughts in the comment section, and have yourself a Merry Christmas and some Happy Holidays. 
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Four Christmas Songs That Make Me Want to Set Myself on Fire

This blog post is coming to you in mid-December, which means that most of you have been enduring non-stop Christmas carols for roughly six weeks now, at the hands of your local retailers' PA systems.

A moment of silence for our brothers and sisters in retail.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Christmas music. Love it. I have "All I Want for Christmas is You" on my Apple-issued listening device, and I rock out to that fucker all year round; December is the only month of the year that I don't have to feel weird about that. 

All I want for Christmas is more 1994 Mariah.

Most popular Christmas songs are all about the good times that the holiday brings; they tell us stories of decking the halls, awaiting Santa Claus' arrival, and celebrating the ability of a congenitally defective reindeer to secure gainful employment as a headlight. Some songs, however, choose to use Christmas as a chance to remind us that life is a meaningless, painful struggle that ends only with the cold oblivion of death. If you're looking for an excuse to douse yourself in kerosene and set yourself ablaze this holiday season, take a moment to listen to four of the most depressing Christmas songs in existence:

The Christmas Shoes (Newsong) - 2000

The Christmas Shoes starts with a man standing in line in a store, waiting to pay for a few last-minutes gifts and generally feeling a little bit grumpy. It's a classic holiday scene; maybe the man is just waiting for a Christmas miracle to come along and boost his holiday spirits until he sweats egg nog and shits tinsel. Or maybe this is a comedy song about the commercial hassle that Christmas has become, with all the shopping and standing in line and airplane food, what's up with that?


Turns out that no, this is not a comedy song.


The man finally pulls his head out of his well-fed, middle-class ass long enough to notice that the customer ahead of him in line is an antsy and thoroughly filthy little boy, clutching a pair of shoes. The boy gets up to the cashier, and because children have no idea how to protect themselves from child molesters by withholding personal information, he proceeds to blurt out his life story with no prompting whatsoever. It turns out that he needs the shoes because they're his sick mother's size and he wants her to look nice when she goes off to "meet Jesus" that night. 

Hint: "meeting Jesus" means she's either dying or she's got an appointment with a burly Mexican biker.

The boy tries to pay for the shoes with a fistful of pennies but comes up short, because he belongs to a special kind of poor family that values fancy new shoes over things like 'food', 'running water' and 'spending the last moments of your mother's life at her side, instead of haggling with a cashier over footwear'. The singer then heroically steps up to pay for the shoes and basks in his new-found Christmas spirit; he even muses that God probably murdered that child's mother just so he could reclaim the holiday joy of standing in line to buy his wife some mustache bleach for Christmas. This song isn't the only one to lean on the crutch of "kill off the maternal figure", however. After all, there's...

Mama Liked the Roses (Elvis Presley) - 1969

Until my mother pointed out to me that this song actually appears on Elvis' Christmas Album, I'd assumed this it was written for the sole purpose of being played at the funerals of dead mothers. The words "Christmas", "holiday", and "sweet, sweet baby Jesus" never actually appear in this song, but since it's wedged between "Blue Christmas" and "Silent Night", radio DJs force themselves to play it on the air every December.


This might not be the best choice for your Christmas caroling group.

Elvis recounts how Mama enjoyed tending a rose garden in her yard each year, but, tragically, she found it difficult to keep her roses growing properly in mid-winter. Plants don't grow well in the winter, you see. Whenever rose-growing got too hard, Mama would comfort her family by, uh, decorating the living room for them. And also, she liked to sing every Sunday until her son cried. And she always made sure that everyone prayed a lot. Wait, what is this song even about?

Apparently he was raised by a religious, interior-decorating rose fanatic. Huh. Explains a lot.

Some time later, Elvis comes across a dried rose tucked in the pages of the old family Bible. This really cements just how gosh darn much his mother loved roses, which is convenient, because that's what they put on her grave every Mother's Day. Wait, Mother's Day? Isn't this a Christmas song? If I knew you were going to throw dead parents at me without even having the courtesy to sing about the proper holiday, Elvis, I'd have declared Burning Love to be a Christmas song and saved myself a lot of misery. But as it turns out, not every Christmas song needs a dead mother to be depressing - just take a listen to...

Fairytale of New York (The Pogues) - 1987

Don't get me wrong here - I love Fairytale of New York. It's one of my favourite songs of all time, Christmas be damned. But take a listen to the lryics. This modern classic opens with a man rotting in a New York City drunk tank on Christmas Eve, listening to a wasted old man singing about how he plans to be dead by next Christmas, and bemoaning his unsalvageable, needy farce of a relationship. Gosh, I just feel so warm and fuzzy already, don't you?

I embedded the version with lyrics. You're gonna need 'em.

As the song progresses, we learn that the man's wife/girlfriend/personal harpy came to New York because the man promised her that she was destined for a successful Broadway career. When this didn't pan out - presumably because she has a voice like an eighty-year-old Irish horse - she spiraled into a hopeless and debilitating cycle of drug abuse. Her inability to sing, dance and act with New York's finest, and her inability to handle disappointment without re-enacting the plot of Requiem for a Dream are apparently completely the man's fault, because of course they are.

Maybe she's just getting ready to audition for RENT?

When the woman finishes her tirade, the man reveals that he has shaped his whole life around his lover, placing his entire chance at happiness and self-worth in her basket of Broadway dreams. Since it's too late for her to achieve any of those dreams, both of them are doomed to suffer together in obscurity, struggling with their unhealthily interdependent relationship. The woman mentions that she hopes this is their last Christmas together, but the man makes it clear that they're both so entrenched in this relationship that it's come to define both of them, as they endlessly replay the memory of the Christmas Eve when they met. Have I mentioned that in Ireland, this is considered the greatest Christmas song of all time? 

Ireland? Are you okay? Do you need to talk to someone?

All that aside, it's still an objectively great song. If you make it past the first one minute and twenty-three seconds without hanging yourself in your closet, it takes on a delightfully jaunty Irish tune. Plus, it's the only Christmas song in which you'll find the lyrics "Old slut on junk" and "Cheap, lousy faggot". In any case, it's certainly less gloomy than...

The Cat Carol (Bruce Evans and Meryn Cadell) - 1993

This is it, folks. Put away the razor blades and hide the ammunition, because if you aren't feeling manically suicidal by the end of this song, you need to see a cardiologist to re-start your cold, blackened heart. Emotionally charged, touching Christmas songs have been popular for years, but songwriter Bruce Evans decided to get behind the wheel of that bandwagon and steer it right over the embankment of animal abuse and dead pets.

Behold.

The Cat Carol, which boasts the lyrical complexity of a six-year-old's garbled rendition of Jingle Bells, tells the story of a cat who gets shut outside in a blizzard on Christmas eve. Despite her anguished cries of pain and misery, the house's occupants refuse to let her inside, presumably because they're far too busy eating cold gruel and denying health insurance to orphans. This cat isn't bright enough to find any form of shelter whatsoever, as she apparently lives in a neighborhood completely devoid of decks, porches, cars, sheds and oversized lawn ornaments, so she hunkers down in the yard and prepares to die of exposure. Just then, a tiny, frozen mouse who's also too dumb to find shelter wanders by, and the cat proposes that they set their differences aside so they can cuddle up together and keep each other company through the storm.

Enjoy the heartwarming feeling, because this is the last time you will ever feel joy.

Up until this point, the song sounds like PETA's new winter jingle, but we're reminded that this is a Christmas song when Santa shows up! Hooray! They're saved! Santa discovers the little ball of fur nestled in the snow and quickly realizes that it's... the frozen corpse of the cat. He lifts her carcass into the sleigh and the mouse pops out, still alive and healthy. The little mouse is overjoyed to learn that the two of them have been rescued, until his cat friend fails to wake up and Santa is forced to explain that she froze to death in an attempt to save him. 

Ho ho holy shit, that's dark.

But not to worry, the song has a happy ending! It's too late for Santa to save the cat's life, but he lifts her into the sky and turns her into a constellation that will appear only on Christmas eve, so that the mouse and the cat can be reunited once a year. It's a beautiful ending, until you realize that the average life expectancy of a mouse in the wild is less than one year; he'll be dead by next Christmas, and the cat constellation will live on as a meaningless clump of stars, symbolizing a sacrifice that no one will be around to recognize.

Merry Christmas, kids.


2

What to Buy for the Person Who Really, Seriously Has Everything

If you're of a Westernized, semi-Christian persuasion, the entire month of December revolves around one thing: university final exams. Oh, and also Christmas. Regardless of how rarely you show your sinning, heathen face in some sort of church, you probably recognize and look forward to this re-purposed Anglo-Saxon midwinter feast day/celebration of the birth of a religious figure who was born in the summer.

What's better than giving birth in a random barn? Giving birth in a random barn in sweltering heat, of course!

Of course, in the modern Western world, no amount of Jesus is enough to supersede the boundless joys of commercialism, and one of the biggest dilemmas any Christmas-observing individual goes through each year is the question of which presents to bequeath to family and friends. Between Groupon, Amazon and Steam sales, everyone already has everything they could ever possibly want; what are you supposed to buy for gifts? Chocolates aren't on the prehistoric raw-and-slimy vegan diets that everyone will start on New Year's Day. Clothing is impossible to buy for someone unless you know exactly how many gut-sucking, space-age girdles they need to squeeze into their current wardrobes. Herpes is the gift that keeps on giving, but it's notoriously hard to gift-wrap.

Or is it?

If you're having a tough time shopping for that picky, spoiled someone in your life, take a look at these appealing options. You'll have to Google links to retailers for yourself, because I have no idea where you live and dammit, no one is paying me any advertising dollars for this. 

Novelty Ice Cube Trays

If there's one thing that all of the rich, poor, middle-class, male, female, elderly, young, paraplegic, ambidextrous, savant and psychic people on your Christmas list have in common, it's that they all use frozen chunks of water to cool down their beverages and numb their various bar brawl wounds. Now, any idiot can fill up a normal ice cube tray, but why make your loved ones suffer through life with regular, cubed ice? This Christmas, baffle your friends and all of their future party guests with the literally endless possibilities of novelty ice shapes.

For the former White Star Line employee in your life.

These aren't just a gag gift for holiday office parties, either - producers of these fine ice molds are more than happy to cater to that certain special someone in your life. 

Ice engagement rings: as cheap, cold and temporary as your eventual marriage.

If silly gifts aren't your forte, don't worry - there are plenty of practical alternatives to standard ice cubes. You can find ice trays for frozen stir sticks, ice rods for water bottles, and even icy corks for chilled wine.

Waiting on an inheritance from an alcoholic relative? Novelty ice trays are there to speed the process along.

The only thing your giftee will need to make these work is a freezer, access to semi-potable water and the patience to painstakingly pop these things out without shattering them. Alternatively, those of us in Canada can just fill them up and stick them outside for a minute or two.

Beard Oil

Ladies, are you tired of running your fingers through the clump of steel wool your man sheepishly calls his beard? Gentlemen, do you look on with pity at the puny scrabbles of scruff sported by male friends and family? Is anyone out there shopping for a female bearded circus freak who's struggling to make it in an image-conscious world? Never fear - I know just the gift for you! Behold:


Made from a combination of mysterious tree oils and the essence of pure manliness, Beard Oil hydrates flaky, shampoo-ravaged under-beard skin and conditions beard hair until it no longer looks like your loved one has pubic hair glued to their face. It can be purchased from homemade vendors jockeying in the wilds of Etsy, or from forward-thinking retailers and mustache allies in your area. Best of all, each application only takes a few drops, which means that the aspiring Gandalf on your Christmas list can make your gift last all the way until next year, when you can surprise them with a new and exciting variety of facial grease. 

Obscenely Gigantic Candy

"The gift that keeps on giving" was originally coined to refer to the phonograph - because apparently that made sense in 1924 - but I think it much more accurately describes these gifts that will absolutely give you Type II Diabetes. In the ultimate testament to Western excess, candy manufacturers have begun pumping out confections that are actually larger than the children who were originally meant to enjoy them. 

Give your friends and family the gift of not being able to make eye contact with you while you eat this.

Remember those palm-sized swirl lollipops that every candy store has in the window? Those are, pardon the pun, child's play. No candy is off-limits; if it's made of sugar, someone has made a donkey-sized version with more calories than the combined contents of your pantry. Send your favourite sweet-tooth into hyperglycemic shock when you surprise them with a Fuzzy Peach the size of their soon-to-be-enlarged heart.

Some rare honesty in advertising.

Plus, if you've got any mythological ogres on your shopping list, you're basically all set.

Wine Bottle Outfits

Christmas family gatherings are not the time to be naked (especially with my family), so why should your wine have to go without clothes? That might sound like the thought process of an unmedicated schizophrenic, but apparently it rings true for enough people that it's led to the blossoming of a new industry. A very sad and sort of creepy industry.

For the friend who's pretentious enough to dress up his wine, but down-to-earth enough to appreciate practical, working-class clothes.

And don't worry if gimmicky costumes are too tacky for you. Thanks to the drunken shoemaker elves who apparently churn these out while the sane people in the world are asleep, your wine can don any sort of style you please, including the scrubs you'll be wearing when someone finally gets around to institutionalizing you, you fucking wine-dressing lunatic. And yes, we as a society have finally reached a point where we're ready and willing to sexualize glass beverage containers.

"Hey. My neck is up here."

Do wine clothes have any real effect on temperature or oxidization? Probably not. But if you swish it in your mouth just right, you can really taste that added self-esteem. And heaven forbid you be a social pariah with naked wine.

Yodeling Pickle

It's a plastic pickle that yodels when you push a button. Need I say more?


Exactly what it says on the tin.

What's the most creative thing you've ever given or received? Leave it in the comments!
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