Archive for March, 2011
Dumber and Dumber
In one of my previous blogs about the state of British education and its impact on the quality of future freelance writing, I mentioned an academic essay I had read that left me somewhat dazed by the onslaught of literary insults it battered into my grey matter. I’m going to share selected excerpts of that [...]
Do You Have a Freelance Writing Mentor?
When I first started freelance writing, I was flying solo. I dabbled here and there. I Googled things and just kind of felt my way along in the dark. Surprisingly, this turned out to be a not-too-rocky start for my freelancing career. I was fortunate in that a decade or so earlier I had done [...]
In Very Bad Taste
During a trawl for relevant articles for a client this morning, I happened across a piece on a dining-out website. This is an extract, and it is quite genuine: “Natural or manmade catastrophes can act as earthquakes, which then generate tsunamis of interest in the flavors of that region …And now the newest incident with [...]
A Freelancing Story
One of the greatest things about being a freelance writer is getting to know folks who are brilliant, clever and funny. Knowing these folks just makes for a brighter day all around. When these kinds of folks happen to be your clients then life is a total parade. Not only do you get to revel [...]
Switched to Overload
Regular readers will know that I had an interview with a journalist some years back that screwed (or certainly hastened the demise of) my career as a novelist. I will never know if my third novel would have been published without his hammer-blow sound-bite that destroyed my relationship with Hodder & Stoughton. Perhaps it just [...]
Does Fancy Really Work?
If you are a freelance writer then it is safe to assume that you have a web site. It’s also a safe bet that your site has a blogging component. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, having the blog on your freelance writing website is about marketing your services as much as anything. There are [...]
Social Notworking
Listen, peeps, I know social networking is important to freelance writers as a form of publicity, but if I spent all the time required to keep on top of it, I would effectively reduce my lifespan to one measurable in dog years. At the moment, I really can’t open the door to it all. Maybe [...]
Twitter as Blogging Fodder
A lot of freelance writers have clients who need blog posts written and posted for their website or websites. Sometimes the client is very specific in their directions to the freelance writer. Other times the writer is encouraged to take the ball and run run run. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these [...]
