About My Work

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Though you can read background information about me in the “About Cerulean Sanctum” tab at the top of the blog body, I still receive e-mails from time to time from readers trying to get a handle on what I do for a living.

I work as a freelance commercial copywriter and copyeditor. My company is Ethereal Pen Productions. People hire me on a contract basis to write for them. By nature, this is a hand-to-mouth business. Some clients return to me again and again for different kinds of writing work. Some jobs are one-time opportunities. As a freelancer, I must always be looking for ways to bring in work.

The type of writing I do is primarily commercial. In other words, I write for businesses. Sometimes I work for a company directly, while other times I’m brought in by graphic design firms or Web site developers to write the text they use in the material they create for others. This makes me a subcontractor for those types of jobs.

What I write consists mostly of marketing materials: brochures, informational pamphlets, corporate Web sites, annual reports, PR, taglines, radio and TV ads, and the like. I also write tech manuals, training materials, speeches, or any other type of written material.

I’ve written material for a number of companies and organizations, including Apple, Inc., NASA, Procter & Gamble, Cintas, LCA-Vision, and more. My clients have included large companies, mom & pops, colleges, non-profits, and ministries—any organization that needs well-crafted documents that capture their essence and communicate their vision to others.

For those looking for written ministry materials, I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Christian Education from Wheaton College. I’ve written hundreds of classroom hours of curriculum for churches and Christian camps. If you need quality material catering to a specific ministry need, I can write it for you.

In addition to my writing, I do copyediting work, cleaning and tightening material written by others.  In this role, I often go beyond corporate writing to include editing services for aspiring novelists and non-fiction authors. I’ll doctor manuscripts and polish proposals. If you want to be published but feel your work needs that additional je ne sais quoi, I can help. One recent book proposal I edited helped secure a five-figure advance from a major publishing house for my client.

If you or anyone else you know needs professionally written documents that sizzle, I can help. No job is too small. If you’re part of a ministry that needs to expand its reach, I can write materials to help you. When reviewing their interactions with me and the quality of work I produce, clients continue to laud the following:

  • My expertise in capturing brand essence and corporate voice
  • My flair for reaching postmodern audiences through unique marketing strategies, including the use of narrative
  • My ability to complete projects ahead of schedule and within budget
  • My relational skills, not only when dealing with companies directly, but also how I interact with their clients
  • My flexibility to adapt to changing project needs and scope.

If you have a copywriting or copyediting need, please contact me at Ethereal Pen Productions.

Business and…

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If you read the About Cerulean Sanctum tab at the top of the blog, you’ll eventually discover that I work from our home outside Cincinnati, Ohio, as a freelance business copywriter and copyeditor. The Web’s been devoid of that reality for quite some time.

I’ve struggled for about eighteen months attempting to get my biz site online. I wanted portal management software to create the site, Ethereal Pen Productionsbut I either got massive nuclear overkill or anemic, prissy code with an attitude. I committed to Joomla!, but its templating system favored graphic designers and code noodlers. With it perpetually in flux between two or three incompatible versions, I finally threw in the towel. In what must be considered massive irony and good fortune, version 2.1.x of WordPress included far better handling of static pages than previous versions (a former showstopper for me), so I took the plunge. The wraps came off the site yesterday. It still needs some tweaking, especially graphics-wise, but I like the lean look.

So, Ethereal Pen Productions finally lives on the Web. You’re invited to critique.

Better yet, if you need anything written, let me know. My kid needs braces.

And…

I’m still recovering from the blowback from Monday’s post, Dissing Discernment. I think all the principle players in the comments have made up. I know now not to juggle five things at once while replying to comments, so even this old diehard learned a few things from the whole conversation.

I didn’t know I was posting anything so controversial, but the whole topic’s a lightning rod. I suspect that’s one reason so few books on the topic exist. Tim Challies should sell a million copies when his discernment tome comes out. Or people will burn piles of it in the town square. You never know. (Maybe just in Canada. They’ve been testy ever since Gretzky fled.)

Whatever the case, blogging will be light in days ahead due to tax prep and deadlines on several writing assignments.

And…

If you’ve got a blog, check your bandwidth. I found a huge spike in my outgo this February. Lucky for me, I’m nowhere maxed out on my five domains. Still, Cerulean Sanctum drowned in bandwidth warning messages toward the end of last month, forcing me to re-apportion things.

So I did a little snooping and found something throttling my site: Yahoo! Slurp.

When I sent a message to Yahoo! asking about the sevenfold increase in the number of daily hits from them compared to the previous month, they told me they’d been experimenting with a plethora of new page-sucking bots and had been hitting some sites hard.

Well, no thank you very much! Fortunately for me, I’ve got some leeway. Nonetheless, their little experiment doubled my bandwidth outgo! (That’s not easy to do, either.) I can imagine that some sites that pay by the byte will receive a nasty little bill from Mr. Host courtesy of the crew from Sunnyvale. I guess the Yahooligans thought they could pick on me because I used to live there, but fled. (Heck, Gretzky got out of California, too!)

A heads up to all of you.

Be blessed…and be wary!