All Entries Tagged With: "freelance writer"
WWW – Wanton Waste of Words
First of all, that’s nice alliteration, huh? Anyway, I stumbled across a couple of study reports in my regular daily rounds and couldn’t quite believe anyone would need to know the information contained therein. Well, it’s all good to know, but, unless you’re an idiot, you really should know it already. On the plus side, [...]
Plan B From Utter Desperation
The eminently sensible man who is my father always used to ask me when I was trying to get acting work if I had a Plan B. Of course I didn’t. Plan Bs were for people whose Plan As weren’t going to work. My Plan A was to become a famous actor and that was [...]
Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For?
When I was doing my TV work, I got an interesting and uplifting perspective on the whole interview process from a big casting director. I had expressed my chagrin at the odds against me (or any of the other actors) securing the part, given the sheer number of us being seen by the casting team [...]
Billy No-Mates
Are you a happy, outgoing individual with a pleasing disposition and a great sense of humour? No, I don’t want a date with you. I only ask because, if you are not yet immersed full-time in freelance writing, you should consider how your character may affect your response to the pressures and loneliness of the [...]
A Time to Write
I had a blog all ready to go until I read the latest offering from Tumblemoose. I now feel compelled to say something more than just a comment at the foot of his post. First of all, I don’t think for one second that writing skills are a “use it or lose it” affair. The [...]
Enough is Enough
In the acting profession, the old adage is that you need to be in work to get work. In other words, people will give you more work when they see what you can do. There’s also a large element of bandwagon-jumping involved; people scrambling to employ you before someone else does. That’s why certain faces [...]
Internet Killed the Writing Star
The Buggles wrote a little ditty back in 1979 called “Video Killed the Radio Star”. It bemoaned the coming age of music videos, portending a career death to all those singers and groups who had once made their living from the radio. Stupid song, really. The singers and groups all inevitably ended up making music [...]
Do You Really Wanna Write? Do Ya?
In a cinematic precursor to his current real-life lunacy, Mel Gibson played a nut-job cop in the Lethal Weapon films. In his first outing as Detective Martin Riggs, he grabbed the chance to talk a jumper out of throwing himself off a high-rise. Having handcuffed himself to the potential suicide, Riggs (suicidal himself) quickly gets [...]
Touron is Hella Funny
In early 2010, Austin Sendek of UC Davis created a petition encouraging the International System of Units to designate “hella” as the prefix for 10 to the power of 27, following “yotta” which of course represents 10 to the power of 24. For a freelance writer I must have a pretty meagre grasp of English [...]
Can Freelance Writing Be Taught?
(Here’s a sensible blog from me. Make the most of it – it won’t last.) This probably seems like a silly question. To a certain extent, all subjects can be taught. However, by the time a person decides that freelance writing is a career they wish to pursue, the formal education necessary to concrete in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Is This The Way To Unemployment? Blogging’s Made Me Sound Like A Right …
Apologies to Tony Christie for the title. Tumblemoose’s last post was pretty awesome in the slap in the face it gave me. I know (think) he wasn’t writing about me, or even including me, but, if I haven’t fallen right in, I think I am certainly skating all around that career-freezing ice hole identified by [...]
Firefox Up Your Productivity
I wrote a blog last year called The Enemy Within about the huge drain that Norton Internet Security places on your computer, causing it to run slowly and sometimes crash. For a freelance writer who needs flow in their work, that’s not good. I advised then that a new security suite called Vipre was my [...]
Want To Be, But Not
I want to be able to fly a helicopter but I don’t go around telling people I’m a helicopter pilot. There’s a good reason for that: I can’t fly a helicopter. I know what you’re thinking: I’m just being hard on myself; I probably can fly a helicopter, but just not as well as I’d [...]
Should You Blog?
I was writing an article about freelance writing and I made some reference to the fact that most freelance writers these days have a web site. I made the assumption that if a freelance writer has a web site then it probably has a blog. Then it occurred to me that perhaps there are freelance [...]
Freelance Non-Writing
When I first started as a freelance writer, I assumed that I would be hired by folks to write stuff for them. It made sense to me, but I what I’ve learned over the past few years is that (like so many other things) I was wrong about freelance writing just being writing. A majority [...]
