What Do You Do for Money, Honey?

Jeff doing freelance writing research.

So, I decided to become a freelance writer, which is a story I’ve told before. Writing is my only marketable skill, after all. Despite our modern ways I have yet to find someone to pay me to drink copiously and utter drunken bon mots, and the idea of a Kickstarter or Patreon just doesn’t sit well with me. Nothing wrong with it, of course, but I don’t like the sense of obligation. I much prefer to write what I want when I want and then randomly publish it and beg for money in return. I don’t like promising a monthly delivery or something like that. It’s a road to trouble, for me. I’d wind up just passive aggressively hating all my supporters, writing stories about their gruesome deaths and creating temporary email accounts in order to send them drunken threats. So the whole crowdfunding thing is out.

But, sadly, writing novels hasn’t turned into the golden highway of money I was promised, so I need to hustle a bit, and so: Freelance writing. Today I’m having a pretty good time with it, writing about books at Barnes and Noble and About.com, writing about my hometown at Life in Hoboken, and doing a few other projects here and there. But in the early days of my freelance career things got dark, fast.

THE DARKNESS IT IS LUBRICATED

When I first got into freelancing, naturally I took on any client who would have me, and wrote about anything they thought needed writing about. This led to a lot of interesting clients and writing a lot of stuff—generally anonymously—about a wide field of subjects I had absolutely no knowledge of. This is, of course, the seedy truth of The Internet: It’s all written by hacks like me who might glance at a Wikipedia article before composing 1,000 words on Scottish Divorce Law, but only if they’re feeling feisty.

Divorce law, the limousine business, same-sex marriage adoption in various Midwestern states, language and translation, real estate—oh, so much real estate—you name it, I wrote about it. I wasn’t even vaguely qualified to write about most of it, either, except in the sense that I can turn out 500 words on anything in about 20 minutes and was willing to work for some seriously sketchy wages.

But the worst, most soul-chilling work I ever did? That’s easy. It was the catalog copy for sex toys.

A DOZEN WORDS FOR VIBRATE

Catalog copy, in case you don’t know, is the stuff you read when reviewing a business’ catalog of wares. Say you’re shopping for a chair, and you open an online or print catalog and read “The Sven Hodor is the greatest chair ever designed. It supports your lower back while gently massaging the buttocks, and mixes martinis automatically in its hollow armrests.” That’s catalog copy! And idiots like me often get hired to write it, because we is good with the words, bad at math, and generally have no self-esteem. Huzzah, me!

Anyways, one of my freelance clients had me writing catalog copy … for a sex toy business. This was, ironically, the least sexy job I have ever had. I’m not squeamish, I don’t think—when they said, hey, can you write about dildos and vibrators and lube for a few cents a word, I said BOW HOWDY CAN I—but this turned into a dispiriting slog for one basic reason: Every sex toy in the universe is basically the same. It is a thing you insert into or rub on certain parts of yourself or your partner or possibly a cat or Japanese sex robot. They try really hard to dress these things up in order to make them seem distinctive, but c’mon: A vibrator is a vibrator.

Now, I’m a creative guy. but even I ran out of ways to describe these things. There is a finite number of ways you can describe a sex toy, and after a few dozen blurbs you definitely lose all perspective, go mad, and wake six months later in a Mexican hospital where everyone makes the sign of the cross when you look at them. This may have had something to do with the promotional videos the client had created for many of its products, which were these weird wordless things that never depicted their actual use (N.B. THANK FUCKING GOD) but resembled those airless videos that run on a loop in your local bank: Smiling models, glamor shots of the dildo in question, and lots of pull quotes that were simultaneously enthusiastic and haunted about this moment in human history when you can find yourself watching an online promotional video about sex toys.

IT’S ALL OVER NOW

I no longer have that client, thank goodness, but the experience stays with me like a brain cloud. The thing about freelancin’ is that you wind up with all this shallow expertise because of the frantic five-minute research sessions and the reading of a client’s background documentation, so while you know absolutely nothing you can spout off endless facts and descriptions. And it’s kind of unsettling that one of my Shallow Expertise Categories is the world of cheaply-manufactured sex toys. It’s a tough category to work into conversation. Or not so tough, depending on how your evening is going.

In the end, I know I’m in good literary company, because plenty of famous writers took on strange writing work to pay the bills, as we writers are a pretty shambolic and disorganized bunch who are forever spending their monies on liquor and cats and designing time machines in our basements and such, and also too because the world still regards writing as something anyone can do and therefore not worth paying much for. Am I proud of my sex toy catalog copy? Not particularly. But neither am I ashamed, which is more than I can say about some of my early fiction, so it’s a wash.