Last week Paula Hendrickson wrote a great guest post for Lori Widmer’s blog on vetting writing experts. This topic is near and dear to my heart because I’ve had more new writers come to me looking for help after taking horrible advice from pseudo experts than I can count. I feel for those writers. It’s easy to get sucked in because some of these charlatans are masters
Not long ago I was contacted by Michelle Nickolaisen, asking if I’d like to review The Freelancer Planner. Of course I said “yes.” Planners? Organization? Schedules? She clearly knew the way to this freelancer’s heart. Total organization junkie over here. Michelle sent over a review copy of the downloadable version of her planner. This is a six-page .pdf planner (minus the cover page) that you can print
I wanted to warn you about a new site called Contena (not actively linking to them because I don’t consider them worth any link juice). I first heard about this site over on Sophie Lizard’s forum at BeAFreelanceBlogger.com. The owners are billing it as some sort of much-needed tool for searching multiple job boards in one place. But to do this, they’re illegally scraping full
I saw a post in my feed reader this morning, and it left me shaking my head. It’s a contender for the “Freelance Advice Hall of Shame” for sure. Really, that should exist. I’m not going to bother linking to it here. I want nothing to do with promoting its nonsense. But I do want to warn newer writers away from this kind of lousy freelance
Do you know what your “perfect day” looks like? Those are the days when you achieve far more than you might normally expect, where you feel good and rested but still productive. They’re the days that don’t leave you feeling drained. They’re the days that leave you wanting more. I know what my “perfect day” looks like because I’ve lived it plenty of times. And
I think most people by nature are polite. Maybe more so with authors, because we’ve had our hearts ripped out and stomped on repeatedly by literary agents and publishers. And maybe there’s some unwritten code I don’t know about, that says if you’re an author and you’re reviewing someone else’s work, you have to give them five stars and a glowing review. If that’s the
Not long ago I published a review of AutoCrit, a self-editing tool designed for authors of fiction. I also found it helpful for nonfiction work such as blog posts. Shortly after reviewing AutoCrit, I was contacted by a rep for Grammarly, another online editing tool for writers which serves as both a spelling and grammar checker. The kind folks at Grammarly set up a test
Recently we looked at eight blog post ideas you can fall back on if you suddenly aren’t sure what to write about on your blog. Today I have another tip along those lines — something you can do on a regular basis to make idea generation a bit easier. This week’s quick tip for bloggers is to write post series rather than relying solely on
Apologies for the delay in this episode of the All Freelance Writing Podcast. I ran into some recording difficulties last week. But that will not affect the schedule for our next episode, which will go out Friday of next week. This week’s episode is a Q&A special — the first general writers’ Q&A special, although I’ve done one specific to bloggers in the past. I