A couple of years ago I wrote about what content mills had taught me, and I ended by saying I was gradually moving my work towards direct clients. Plenty of people have asked how that's gone, so here's an update - and some thoughts for anyone trying to decide which route makes sense.

2017 was, by most measures, a bit of a year. I coped in the usual way: by reading a ridiculous amount of science fiction, mostly on the bus and often well past a sensible bedtime. Here are the books that stayed with me, in no particular order.

Earlier this year I kept seeing articles about Replika, a chatbot app that's designed to be less of an assistant and more of a companion. Its makers describe it as an AI friend that learns from you as you talk to it. As someone who works alone, writes for a living and has an unhealthy interest in anything that sounds like science fiction, I didn't need much persuading. I decided to talk to it every day for a month and see what happened.

People who work in offices tend to imagine that working from home is one long, cosy day in pyjamas with a cat on your lap. Some days it is. Most days, if you're not careful, it's a slow drift towards talking to the kettle and realising at 4pm that you haven't been outside, spoken to a human or eaten anything that wasn't toast.

I've been freelancing from home in London for nearly five years now, in a series of rented flats of steadily decreasing size. Here's what's helped me stay productive and, more importantly, sane.

I have a confession to make, and given that it's nearly Christmas I'm hoping for a bit of goodwill. I don't make my own pastry for mince pies. I used to, every year, and every year I'd end up with butter under my fingernails, flour on the ceiling and pastry that was, at best, about as good as the stuff from the supermarket.

So I've stopped. Life is short, December is busy, and a ready-rolled sheet of shortcrust is one of the great inventions of the modern age. What I do instead is put my effort into the filling, which is where the flavour is anyway.

I've written thousands of product descriptions. Handbags, teapots, garden furniture, specialist bicycle parts, scented candles, a surprising number of things for dogs. If there's one thing that writing that many teaches you, it's how quickly they all start to sound the same - and how much difference it makes when they don't.

Here's how I try to keep them fresh, even on the 200th description of the week.

When someone tells me they don't like board games, what they almost always mean is that they don't like Monopoly. Which is fair. Monopoly is a game designed to go on for four hours and end in a family argument, and it is extremely good at doing both of those things.

The good news is that board games have changed enormously over the last twenty years. There's now a huge range of games that are quick to learn, don't require you to be ruthlessly competitive and are genuinely fun with a glass of wine on a Saturday evening. These are the ones I bring out when I'm trying to convert a sceptic.

I promised in my first post that I wouldn't shout about politics, and I'm going to try to keep that promise. But I've spent the last few weekends leafleting, standing outside stations and having the same conversation about air pollution roughly four hundred times, so I hope you'll forgive me one post about it.

The London elections were last Thursday. You'll know by now that Sadiq Khan is our new mayor. Sian Berry, the Green candidate, came third - ahead of the Liberal Democrats - and the Greens kept two seats on the London Assembly. If you only judge by who ends up in City Hall, that doesn't sound like much. I don't think it's the right way to judge it.

There's a specific kind of tired you get after a day of staring at a screen and arguing with a client about whether "bespoke" is still a word people respect. It's the kind of tired where takeaway starts to look like a perfectly reasonable life choice. This dal is my answer to that. It uses things I almost always have in the cupboard, it takes about half an hour, and most of that time you can spend sitting down.

It also costs very little, which matters when you're freelancing and payday is more of a vague rumour than a date.

About once a week someone gets in touch asking for "a quick proofread" of something. About half the time, what they actually need is an edit. This isn't anyone's fault - the words get used interchangeably all the time - but it does mean people end up either paying for more than they need or, more often, expecting more than they've paid for.

So here's a plain-English guide to what the different services actually mean, at least the way I and most editors I know use them.

When I tell other writers that a good chunk of my income still comes through content platforms, I tend to get one of two reactions. Either a sympathetic wince, or a slightly too casual "oh, which ones?" from someone who's clearly doing the same thing and doesn't talk about it at parties.

I've been writing through Textbroker, Writer's Domain, Elance and People Per Hour for about three years now. Content mills have a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved - the pay at the bottom end is genuinely grim - but they've also taught me more about the practical side of writing than any course I could have paid for. Here's what I've picked up.

So this is the bit where I'm supposed to introduce myself, and I have to admit that after three and a bit years of writing other people's "About Us" pages, writing my own is surprisingly hard. It turns out it's much easier to make a luxury handbag sound fascinating than it is to make yourself sound vaguely interesting without coming across as smug. Bear with me.

I'm Abi. I live in London, I write for a living, and I've been doing it on a freelance basis since 2012. Most of what I do is copywriting - web pages, product descriptions, catalogue copy, blog posts that go out under someone else's name - plus a decent amount of editing and proofreading. I also write regularly for a couple of online arts, culture and lifestyle magazines, which is the part of the job that lets me go to things and then have opinions about them in public.