Freelancing

I have a confession to make: for the longest time, I found the idea of freelance writing scary. I'm not sure where this perception came from, I just remember having discussions with a long line of writers who complained that since they wrote nonfiction for a magazine/newspaper/website all day, they had no motivation to work on their own writing when they got home. So, I suppose I was worried that I'd kill off my muse if I forced her to work on potentially boring stuff all day.
But being alone all day in a foreign country where you aren't allowed to work but where everything costs twice as much because your currency sucks will make a person do strange things (and I don't mean selling your blood for cash, though I may have considered it). So a couple weeks ago, I signed up to freelance some articles at Demand Studios. The pay isn't bad - $15 an article, and they take about an hour to write. But what's more interesting is that I'm actually getting something out of the experience.
For example, the copy-editors there hate passive voice. Use it too much and they stab you with their red-tipped pens. Passive voice also tends to show up in my creative work way too often. So being forced to write without it is really good practice.
Plus, some of the articles are just fun. I mean, I got paid to write about How to Make Dried Gourds into Fairy Houses. Or, I can use subjects I've already thoroughly researched again and again to write articles, like the Visa Process for a Wedding in England With a UK Fiance When You Live in America (in case your wondering, the visa process is crap).
But weirdest and best of all is actually getting a paycheck for stuff I wrote. This has never happened to me before, aside from that time I won a writing contest worth money at school. It's very cool. I don't have to live in a cardboard box on the streetcorner to be a writer! ... I just have to live in a very, very tiny closet apartment. And not have a phone or internet. Woo!