When this blog goes for any length of time without an update it’s normally because I have succumbed to my tortoise-like nature and become incredibly lazy, but this time it’s mostly because I have been incredibly busy.

What follows after the jump is a brief summary of my last five months or so, what I have learnt about myself, what I have done and what I am doing.

I am earning money as a freelance writer

If you want to employ a freelance writer, please drop me a line on davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom, replacing the capitalised DOTs and ATs with their relevant symbols.

At the moment I’m probably not quite earning enough to give up the day job, which is a shame, because I gave up the day job, but that just means I need to find another day job in the near future.

I am now (results pending) a fully qualified NCTJ journalist.

I did a full time course set by the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists:  An acronym that I still embarrassingly enough get muddled up whenever I say it) that finished a couple of weeks ago.  I met some fantastically talented people there, some of whom will undoubtedly be the next big thing in your favourite paper, on your favourite website or your favourite news broadcast programme.  The rest are probably sick of journalism right now and will need a break because the course is rather intense, unrelenting and tends to beat the journalism into you so hard that some of it will occasionally go right through and come out the other side.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this is interested in a career in journalism, do an NCTJ.  You won’t realise how little you know until you do.  I did mine at News Associates, who have centres in London and Manchester and although they are pricey by comparison, it is the first piece of education that I have paid for that I feel I not only got a good deal but probably didn’t pay them enough for all the work they put in.

I have finished internships

I spent the last five months going into Dennis Publishing as an intern for Bit-Tech and Custom PC.  Fantastic website with really good writers who above all else know what they’re talking about.  The amount of academic theory I learnt on my NCTJ can be matched by practical experience from my time there so if anyone out there is thinking of a career in journalism, get some work experience and you will be amazed at how much you learn.

I also had a stint as a volunteer staff writer for brokemycontroller.com and may repost some of the stuff I wrote there here at a later date.  They’re nice guys and definitely have a passion for what they do, even if their site design tends to give me a bit of a headache and their Joomla! CMS system made me want to scream.

I can also technically say I might have something internship-like lined up with the BBC, but that’s not as great or concrete as it sounds, so I won’t say it.

I love reviewing games

I can’t believe people get paid to do it.  Admittedly, you get the occasional headache, like previewing an incredibly complex historical strategy about feudal Japan that is about subtlety and diplomacy and might or might not be full of bugs because it’s not completely finished yet, but anyone out there writing about games on a regular basis probably has the best job in the world.  Every now and then you get given something to play that you would never have looked at before, is new, unique and genuinely interesting, even if it isn’t all that good.

The weird thing is, I can completely see how it still becomes work and a slog.  I would find myself coming back from lunch on my internship and thinking “I have to play this game again” shortly followed by mentally giving myself a hard slap when I thought back to my old job of printing out tens of thousands of letters that had to be sorted and put in boxes.

I love sub-editing

Production journalism is where you set out a page for a newspaper or magazine, proof read text, make sure it all fits and edit it down if necessary and think up clever headlines.  It’s like filling in a crossword without any of those pesky cryptic clues that make you feel like an idiot child.

I am writing a book

A novel is something I’ve always wanted to write and considering I have a bit of free time at the moment and am in the business of writing I can’t think of a good reason not to write one.  At the moment it is shaping up to be to literature what Tron is to Computer Science, so it could pass for it to the untrained eye and I think the untrained eye market is a good place to start.  I’m fully aware of how unethical that sounds but that’s not quite what I mean.

I think there’s a temptation to say “I want to write the next Harry Potter” but realistically, who doesn’t?  The next Harry Potter will probably be about Harry Ron and Hermione’s children that are thrown at us in the nauseating final chapter of the last book and will be rolled out if Rowling decides to pull a Lucas and do another series set in her world (dammit I told myself I wouldn’t make a reference to Star Wars in this post) so instead of The Next Harry Potter, I’ll settle for just simply writing The Next Book.

 

Finally, if you’ve made it this far you must be a dedicated reader or someone with very little else to read, because I suspect I made this post for me rather than you.  Regardless, you might want to follow me on Twitter by following @ChatoicTortoise