I’ve been picking up more and more work lately as a paid guest blogger. At first I was concerned about this phenomenon, as most of my writing is usually anonymous and attributed to somebody else. As a guest blogger I am open to public criticism through comments on my posts made by the blog visitors. Quite often the project brief will include responding to comments made about my posts on the blog site, which means I are actively discussing my work with the general public.

I have discovered I really enjoy this aspect of working for blog sites, I am also really having fun with the fact I am expected to write opinionated copy, which is designed to solicit a response from the readers. Several of the blogs I am a guest poster at have actually asked me to be controversial bordering on antagonistic and this is great fun.

As the world wide web fills up with more and more blogs, I am looking forward to working on more of these fun projects.

One of the tasks I often have to undertake as a freelance writer, is editing work already produced by somebody else. This can actually be quite a fun task and it allows you to take a critical look at the writing style of the original author, quite often in the past I have assimilated concepts gleaned from my editing tasks into my own writing style.

The downside of an editing job is that it is very hard to price, at one end of the scale are the simple jobs which involve correcting grammatical mistakes and spelling errors, these types of projects are great. At the nasty end of the scale are the projects which require huge amounts of re-writing of the original copy, these can often be more time consuming than writing the pie\e from scratch would.

It can be really hard to gauge which type of editing is required from a project brief, it can really be an "open the can and take a look" kind of deal, sometimes the contents are tasty, at other times you wish you could put the lid back on.

I face many challenges each day in my job as a freelance writer, one in particular used to be quite difficult to overcome. Many of my clients are based in the United States, and as such they require all of the copy I deliver to be written using American English.

As a UK native, this used to be a problem for me, there are many differences between UK English and American English, spelling and grammar are the two most obvious, but it goes deeper than this, tun of phrase, slang, sentence structure, all of these things are quite different.

I have gotten quite good at writing in the American style over the years, but recently I have been having the reverse problem. I am writing more and more for the American audience, so much so that when I am writing for my UK clients, I find myself using the American style. It is very odd to find this happening, and quite surprising in it’s own way.