Around April of last year I started working for Demand Studios. For those of you who don't know, they're the people who provide all the content for websites like eHow, Answerbag, etc. At first I was ecstatic -- the money, while nothing to dance a jig over, was certainly more than enough to live comfortably in the lovely (read: 14.3% unemployment rate) state of Michigan. For a time I was making my share of money and was doing quite well writing about pointless, mindless drivel like "How to Install Age of Mythology" and "How to Tell If Your Monitor Is Working".
Seriously -- those were two of the titles I was tasked with writing at one point.
It was fun for a while, but now I find myself... well... loathing it. It's turned something I have always loved to do, namely write, into something that feels like a chore. The initial challenge in finding interesting ways to express a three-word thought in 300 word has dissipated, replaced with a frustration and dread of having to look at my workplace dashboard and finding three more rewrites because my editors are too goddamn lazy to correct a misplaced period or change two letters around. That's where my real complaint lies -- not with the article choices or the management or even the other writers (many of whom are nice as hell), it's with these slack-jawed editors who either got lucky, knew someone already at the company or flat-out lied on their resumes to get in.
It's not even the majority of the editors, either. A fair majority of them are nice, considerate and helpful. But there are a few who will send everything back to you because, I assume, they feel they aren't doing their job if they don't find something wrong with a particular article -- even if that means making something up or not so much as lifting a finger to do the very thing in which they are paid to do: EDIT.
Most of the time the edits themselves aren't even that difficult; usually a spelling correction or a sentence rewrite. Lord knows if you've ever read anything I've written for Binge Gamer you know I'm not beyond mistakes and any writer would be mad to ignore critiques. All the same it can really bring you down when you log in to your workplace account and you find that yet another piece of yours has been flagged for a "rewrite" because the editor couldn't take the two seconds to move a period from "en.d" to "end.".
I know it sounds silly, but this kind of small stuff drives me nuts and waking up every day to see something being picked apart because of a single spelling or punctuation error makes the entire writing process feel tedious. But... oh well. I'll probably get over it in a week.
-JW
