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Having a Boom! With the Holidays

Who the bananas has time to blog on their own site this time of year? In between tying off the big holiday rush and jamming out my vanity projects, any non-compulsory work falls behind in priority after my dedicated #GenX slacker lifestyle.

Yeah, right. Actually, folks, in the content marketing / online blogging business, I type all day and all night until I fall asleep with my beak on the keyboard typing “zzzzzz” and then my adorable wife drags me to bed, from whence I spring into action hours later to gargle espresso and run back to the keyboard. How can you turn down extra money this time of year?

**Video Review Debut: Boom! (1968)**

When last we joined my escapades, I was as amazed as everyone else to have pulled off my first video review for 366 Weird Movies, with Legacy of Satan. Well, hold your horses, because I videoed again this month with a video review of Boom! (yes, it’s spelled with an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) (1968), Liz Taylor and Rich Burton.

Because those 2 movies will totally have fan overlap, right? Don’t leave now, I have done much more than this in the past month, after the jump.

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Work From Home Freelance Writers: How Much To Charge?

Work From Home is the new hot trend in the COVID era. After my 20+ years in freelancing over the Internet, you’re all finally catching up to me. Good (at least I think so)! For freelancer content writers who are just starting out, the #1 most common question I see asked is about how to set rates.

I’m going to try to tell you in the clearest possible way how to set your rates as a freelance writer.

How Much To Charge For Freelance Content Writing? (short answer)

The short answer to how much to charge is a simple formula:

a: Your rate per word
b: How many words you can write per hour (reasonably)

If A x B = a decent hourly wage for where you live, that’s a reasonable rate to charge. As a basic rule of thumb.

There’s a lot of fudge factors that affect this number, however. The content you will be writing may be faster or slower going due to the need for extensive research. The amount of non-writing effort you have to put into the project (spreadsheets, managing WordPress, communicating with the client’s team, etc.) may take up some time worth billing for too.

If I’m just raw typing on a subject I already know pretty well, I can easily do 500 words per hour. Nitpicky research, needing to format things in HTML, having to provide images, those slow me down to an average of about ~200 wph. By that point, I tend to bill by the hour instead.

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How To Make Freelance Writers Barf With Just One Job Listing

I am here today to speak on behalf of all keyboard hacks everywhere. From the lowest SEO rat off Fiverr to the most successful content marketing guru. Every single one of us is sick of flowery writing gig ads.

Let me save you time: If you really want to attract top talent that will actually work for you, the golden ad formula is this:

How Your “Help Wanted” Ad For A Writer Should Look:

PAY – MENTION! THIS! FIRST!
Schedule – Being as flexible as possible helps us cram your project into that five-hour gap in our week.
Topic – WHAT will I be writing? If there’s more to it than just writing, mention duties i.e. editing, social media management, WordPress plug-in slingin’, etc.
Company – WHAT is your business model? What is your mission statement? Essentially, how is my writing supposed to make you money?
Target audience – WHOM will I be writing for? Are they old fuddie-duddies who still own black-and-white TVs? Are they young hip teens? Working-class moms? Entrepreneurs?

This should be easy stuff. You sell something to somebody and now you want a content marketer, don’t you? One of the biggest things that will make us freelance writers skip your ad is if you sound like you have no clue as to any of the above points.

But in the first, most essential place, please spare us these sugary funeral eulogies like this one somebody pitched at me on Linked-In. This is not to reflect on the company. This is just an education in what writers actually think about when they read your ad.

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New at GeekyDomain: Shaver Mystery and Congruent Insanity

Over at my new favorite arena, GeekyDomain, I got the chance to dive deep into one of the great literary mysteries in fandom, the Shaver Mystery stories published in postwar Amazing Stories magazine. At first, it seems like the tale of a harmless nut who happened to be able to turn his hallucinations into a good story. But it grows into something baffling and just a little bit unsettling. Lemuria isn’t the only place with monsters roaming the landscape, it turns out, but the demons in our collective consciousness might be the scariest of all!

Click through for bonus content:

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A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

On the Beauty of Questions

Once a year over at my 366 Weird Movies reviewing gig, I turn in one philosophical rant about the nature of weirdness in art. The new one is a little bit of Zen navel-picking speculation I call “Questions Are Beautiful.” It was provoked by a comment somebody made on my review of Cube (1997), saying an analysis of the ontological mystery would make good meat for an essay, so I green-lighted myself to accept the challenge.

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New at 123ish: Spotlight on Junji Ito, Legendary Horror Mangaka

In my continuing self-indulgence as a soapboxing manga fan, I got the opportunity to rave about the works of Junji Ito, the horror mangaka behind The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Uzumaki, and many other groundbreaking horror manga classic works.

I capture video interviews with Ito himself, links to discussions of his work, and much more. Some say Junji Ito is more silly than scary, but I actually see a balance in the man’s work. It really is like a far-east capture of the spirit of western horror anthology comics, such as EC Comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear) & company.

“This is my hole! It was made for me!”

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New at Suggested Reads: HP Lovecraft Books That’ll Give You Nightmares

So apparently, the late H.P. Lovecraft has gained new-found popularity with younger generations, even though he was about as politically correct as Archie Bunker. Over at Suggested Reads, a new site for discovering quality literature, I had the opportunity to at last dive into the works of Lovecraft and ink out a map for the first-time Arkham tourist.

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Bad Assumptions Everyone Makes About A Zombie Apocalypse

Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.

Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.

Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.

So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.

But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.

No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!

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News At 366 Weird Movies – I’m in a book!

A few of my reviews whirled by over at 366 Weird Movies while I was too busy with other things (week off for Father’s Day and all that). To catch up:

CAPSULE: AGAINST THE CLOCK (2019) – A messy mish-mosh of cyberpunk spy thriller themes, as half-baked as the sloppy CGI fractals and hyperactive jump cuts that frame this abortion of a film.

CAPSULE: KEOMA (1976) – Could have been a contender for the last great spaghetti western, but is ruined by the Soundtrack From Hell. Yes, you heard right, and you’ll wish you’d never heard. You’re asking of course, how bad can this possibly be? Here’s a sample. Now imagine that crotch-splitting abomination going on for the ENTIRE MOVIE. That’s right, it never shuts up, a continuous Greek chorus obliterating every serious moment for the 105 minute run-time.

CAPSULE: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) – A harmless descendant of Miami Vice, with lots of booby cheesecake and a loose story that has something impenetrable to do with a snake, a toilet, a blow-up doll, a skateboard, and a razor-edged Frisbee.

But let’s get to the important part

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