• What You Need If You Want to Get Traditionally Published

    Tweet If you’re reading this, you want to be published. You want to become an author or be published in a mainstream magazine. Congratulations on acknowledging this HUGE first step! As someone who has walked this path from absolutely no writing experience aside from an internship to working full-time as a copywriter to eventually getting published in newspapers and magazines,…

  • How to Fail Like a Boss

    Tweet Being a writer requires fierce tenacity. Not just to write every day when there’s no deadline, but because rejection comes with the territory. You could devote eight hours a day six days a week to writing, thousands of dollars in classes, memberships, and coaching, and still get those template rejections. The ones that say writing is subjective so don’t…

  • If You’re Submitting Your Work, Don’t Do This

    Tweet Full disclosure here. A professor once told me I’d be a professional student and I didn’t prove him wrong. I still take oodles of writing courses from the comfort of my home. And one thing I’ve been hearing a ton from literary agents are all the true and shocking stories of writers who write obnoxious things in response to…

  • A Writer’s Therapist: Ways to Deal With Rejection

    Tweet Just this Thanksgiving, I sent out a silent prayer of thanks for an inbox void of rejection letters. Guess what I received a few hours later? Thank you agent for taking time from your busy holiday schedule to decline my manuscript! In my writer’s critique group, I am the only one who has sent over a 100 submissions with…

  • A Writer’s Therapist

    Tweet Hi there. It’s been months. I’m not sure if anyone is still reading this, but if you are, welcome. I got my graduate degree in counseling psychology years ago. But for the last decade, I’ve been working as a writer. The more I wrote, the more writing seemed to circle back to the same themes of health, wellness and…

  • How to Handle Criticism and Rejection

    Tweet I doubt any writer is immune to the vulnerability that comes with handing over your work to someone else. It’s a brutal business this writing thing. But it’s part of what you sign up for when you decide to be a writer. Recently, my rejections have dug deep into my heartstrings only because I’m getting closer to work that means…

  • How to Separate Your Work from Your Worth

    Tweet The deeper you get into your work, the harder it is to separate your self from what you’re working on. You’ll notice that the more passionate, the more involved you are, the more the deep dark stuff of your unconscious seeps out. It’s easier to live life on the surface. That way when rejection happens, it doesn’t hurt as…

  • How to Persevere Through Rejections

    Tweet If you’re suffering through a field of rejections, keep reading… It took awhile, but eventually I found a pace, my zone, an ability to actually push through my anxiety and create articles I was proud of. But more importantly, got paid for. That was a great feeling, but I didn’t sit in my laurels for long before I had a desire…

  • The One Tip That Helped Me Cope With Criticism

    Tweet No matter how long you’ve been writing, it always gets to you. The formal rejection letter. The kind, but full revision request. No reply. Writers are subjected to rejection as part of their job. But it doesn’t make things easier. While I tend to get over it faster than I did 7-years ago when I started as a freelance writer,…

  • Is Your Ego Getting in the Way of Your Writing?

    Tweet All artists have trouble with their egos. Maybe it’s because unlike other fields, our sense of self and our creation are personally intertwined in a beautiful, yet complicated relationship. We often get defensive when editors pick away at our prose. And when finally hitting send on that perfect piece we spent days on, we’ve never felt more vulnerable. That’s…