Hitting the wall
It is 2.30 am, and I can't sleep. Today I must file my final piece for American Express's FXIP blog , which is being mothballed. Writing for that blog has been my main source of income for the last four years. Once it is gone, my income will once again become precarious and inadequate, as it has been all too often in the past. Hence my sleeplessness. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry that the blog is closing. I've done some interesting work for it, and learned a lot. And it has been a reliable source of income during the difficult times of the last three years. For that, I am grateful. But I don't enjoy writing for it. The house style is dry to the point of desiccation, devoid of all opinion, emotion and metaphor. It is also SEO-driven, so I am constantly trying to find ways of including key words assigned by someone else. True, the key words are set from the brief, but it means there is no flexibility. I can't simply go where my mind leads, as I do wh...