For the first time in my 11-year career, I almost missed a deadline this week. I somehow got two deadlines mixed up, so I turned in one article several days early and didn’t realize the mix-up until the day the second article was actually due. Thankfully I’m a fast writer and I had already done …
Nov 17, 2008 Advice, Organization, Rules, Writing
I like to work at Borders. Today, I take a cushy seat in the nearly-empty café. Soon afterwards, a tunelessly humming old man takes a seat right next to mine. And now all the seats in the café are filled so I can’t move. I’m trying to write a blog post for Monday and am …
Nov 14, 2008 Rants
Freelancer and author Michelle Goodwin has a must-read guest post on the New York Times’ “Shifting Careers” blog this week. Michelle’s the author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube and the recently released My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for …
Nov 11, 2008 Advice, Marketing, News you can use, Writers
This article was originally published in Writer’s Digest.
Whenever I ask aspiring magazine writers why they don’t get started writing queries, they say the same thing: “I’m afraid of interviewing people.” And their fears aren’t unfounded — I’ve written for over 100 magazines and have probably interviewed more than 1,000 people in the past seven …
Nov 10, 2008 Advice, Interviewing
Thanks to a tweet yesterday from LeilaM, I discovered a fantastic writing tool called Write or Die. It’s a web-based program where you set a word-count and time goal, along with a reminder mode to kick you into action (mode choices are “gentle,” “normal,” “kamikaze,” and “electric shock”) and start writing. When you let up, …
Nov 6, 2008 Cool tools
