Enteralterego - read me first

Being a freelance copywriter is a fabulous career path. That might seem a pretty obvious statement, especially when it's made by a freelance copywriter, and it's also not the snappiest way to start my inaugural blog. Please bear with me, though - that sentiment is very important, in terms of everything that will follow on this site over the coming months and years.

Writing is a great way to earn an income, but it's also incredibly hard work, and most of the time, you're not really getting the opportunity to write what you truly want, or believe. You might be able to cultivate a specialist subject (or two, in my case - residential property and cars), but the chances are you'll be writing on behalf of clients, who will typically only accept positive critiques and glowing commendations of their products, services or personalities. Even writers working in the media are usually constrained by creative straitjackets like house writing styles, over-enthusiastic sub-editors or enforced bias.

This leaves the creative writer in something of a quandary. Since discretion is the better part of invoicing, what can be done to indulge the sheer, undiluted thrill of sitting down to a blank page, and simply writing whatever takes your fancy? When does a freelance writer get to be honest, and not worry about using intransitive verbs instead of their (more socially acceptable) transitive siblings? Is it unprofessional to insert three bracketed words into a sentence? And what volume of vitriol would befall any poor writer who incorporated four successive questions into one paragraph of text?

Well, this blog is my riposte to such nit-picking. And I know I'm not supposed to start a sentence with the word "well" followed by a comma, much less start one with "and", which is a conjunction designed to straddle two words rather than to connect two sentences. Don't bother observing that I've incorrectly used a past participle in a rant about cheese, or inserted more than the recommended two commas in one sentence, which, apparently, is grammatically poor. I'm off the clock, as our transatlantic cousins are stereotypically believed to say. Perfect grammar is taking a well-earned holiday, although its cousins punctuation and spelling will be keeping order in its absence. And do you know something else? Apart from incorrectly using a conjunctive again, I might only proofread these blogs once before I upload them. How decadent is that?

As for my subject matter, that will be as free-form as my sentence construction and observance of linguistic conventions. I might write about queue-jumpers, or woolly jumpers, or anything else that takes my fancy. This is not a plug for my company, the award-winning G75 Media copywriting agency, and nor is it intended as a showcase for my lexicon of arcane polysyllabics. It's just me, slouched at my desk and probably wearing a dressing gown, writing for the sheer unmitigated joy of it. Copywriting doesn't get better than this.