Tweet {photo credit} This is it! It’s December 31st, 2010. We’re just hours away from the end of the new year. Before 2011, I wanted a chance to give you one more gift. And since it’s the last one, it has to be BIG. So here we go! TIP #8: Live BIG! I don’t know if you noticed, but I haven’t been writing here very often. I actually haven’t been writing anywhere. I stopped writing. Stashed away my laptop. And even put away my pen and notebook. Why? The Importance of Shutting Down I got sick. In Eastern medicine, the…
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Tweet Freelance writer Laura Spencer wrote another brilliant post on Freelance Folder entitled 30 Spooky Freelancing Practices. Her list included everything from bad mouthing clients to internet surfing instead of working. Anyone guilty of that? I’ll admit to the latter in the past. Oops. But while I have looked fear in its face (sometimes in the eyes of a scary scary client), none of the 30 items (though good) can match the scariest of them all. It’s this: The fear that I’m not good enough that I’ll never make it as a professional writer. If you have never felt this…
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Tweet Carson Brackney’s back and better than ever. Lucky for me he’s written a new guest post that will blow you away. It’s all about freelancing and time scheduling. Thanks Carson! So, you have the schedule thing all figured out. Everyone talks about how tough it is to maintain any semblance of a reasonable life as a freelancer, but you aren’t worried. You have the calendar. You have the time slots all lined up, filled up, organized, planned and your work life for the week will be so smoother than Yul Brynner’s scalp after a Crisco application. Yeah, right. The…
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Tweet DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME (or anywhere else for that matter!) 5 Tips for Freelance Writers on What Not to DO Don’t settle. You remember being in your twenties, desperate and single? Or how about a time when you really really wanted something so much so that you felt desperate. That’s kind of how I felt when I first started freelancing. I said, “Sayonara” to my plum job at Apple. With that, I was unemployed and scared silly about what was next. So what’d I do? I applied for every job that came my way and I took any…
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Tweet {photo credit} Ever read someone else’s writing and cringe? Not because they did a hacked up job of writing and/or editing, but because they are SO good! They are so good that you are suddenly reduced to the insecurities of a teenager. And from out of nowhere you hear yourself saying (in a surprisingly high piercing nasally voice I might add), “Why oh why can’t I write like that?!” Been there done that my friend. I too, agonize over another writer’s perfect prose. The witty way they used that word or the colorful way they intertwined adjectives. I usually…
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Tweet Got too many plates up in the air? I hear you. Writing while you’ve got other things to tend too can be exhausting to say the least. But this is the problem: Those plates? They still need to get done. You’re going to have to do all of them (marketing, editing, writing, transcribing, etc.) and still do them well too. So I’m going to let you in on a little secret. {Something that’s helped me power through articles, blog posts, queries and cover letters.} I’m a jumper. Not the adventurous parachuting kind. But the “I’m a writer and I…
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Tweet I don’t know if this is a girl thing. But my hair is my best friend and my worst enemy. I have a lot of hair! As a kid, I bemoaned the day I forgot to bring a rubber band. In swimming class, my hair floated around me. I was a body of hair with a tiny body attached. And it gave the boys extra ammunition to tease me that day and call me, “Medusa.” Boy was that hard to shake off! As an adult, my hair still gets in my way. When I’m working out it falls forward…
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Tweet You ever write and write, then write again. But you keep hitting a brick wall? Something’s just not quite right and you can’t put your finger on it? You may be suffering from the inability to let go. A frustrating writer’s syndrome. Second to only writer’s block. It happens when you’ve grown attached to your writing. You’ve spend weeks, months, maybe even years on the same piece. But it’s just not where you want it to be. Yet, you remember all of the good times you had together. The state you were in when you wrote it. The feeling…
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Tweet I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I wonder, for example, if there is such a thing as age discrimination in writing. Does one get less respect the younger he or she is? I also think about whether your age or your perceived age makes you more or less marketable in the freelance writing biz. Why do I ponder these things at 9:51 in the evening? I wonder because I’ve been trolling the forums lately and have heard people concerned about being a late bloomer in the business. At the same time, I was discouraged by acquaintances when…
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Tweet {photo credit} Remember that old 90’s rap song by the Old School Players? I don’t know what they were rapping out back then, but it’s a good reminder of what we need to do today as better business men/women and in general freelancers. I saw the King and Queen of comedy Tina Fey and Steve Carell on the Oprah Winfrey show months ago. They were talking about their movie Date Night and were asked what they admired about one another. Fey said, “The kind of detail and specificity that he (Steve Carell) brings to his character Michael Scott of The…