With summer bearing down, it’s a great time to reassess your freelance writing business. Anytime is a good time, but if things are slowing down or you’re needing to step away, use the time to find better footing within your business. Since it’s also a time when my life goes into vacation mode and utter…
Freelance writing advice
Tuesday Freelance Take: Taking Time Off
It’s the unofficial start to summer. A time when vacation schedules are blown up by deadlines, laptops are packed along with beachwear, and conference calls happen from the car. Such is the life of a freelancer. Or not. How about not? My summer is already mapped out. I have three months of traveling, with some…
How to Lose –and Win– at Freelancing
I call this post A Tale of Two Writers. A friend of mine knows of a writer who, on the surface, should have made a serious killing the last two years. The writer in question –let’s call her Writer #1 — has a background in healthcare, senior care, aging, wellness, and medicine, among other things….
3 Shifts to Put the ‘Free’ Back in Freelance
Sometimes you come to your breaking point. Sometimes when that happens, you break. Or sometimes you find a way through the stress and you vow to make changes so that you don’t reach that breaking point again. Oh, those best laid plans, eh? We freelancers suck at taking care of ourselves. It’s true. We put…
My Freelance Pros (and Cons) in 2021
I’m out of the office all month. Did your throat just tighten up? The idea of taking time off at all usually gives me hives or agita or stresses me to the point it takes days to relax on vacation. But this time, I walked away easily. Very easily. Since April 2020, I’ve been working like…
Freelance Writers Behaving Badly
It happened again. Who am I kidding? It happens continuously. In forums, in email, in groups. People everywhere are committing the same sins that label them all. They act like lazy little shits. I was researching markets for a client pitch. A website I located had a list of markets for that particular niche industry….
A Zen Writer’s Guide to Reducing Stress
It’s funny how sometimes you go along, mired in stress, thinking about work after hours, losing sleep (literally), and then it hits you: You don’t have to write like this. Since early April 2020, I’ve been swimming in projects. That’s 19 months of working nearly nonstop on what amounted to (and still amounts to) roughly…
The Freelancer’s Stress-reducer Guide
It took three days for my shoulders and neck to relax. But they did. Vacations these days are tough to come by. Either you’re too busy to go anywhere or you’re out of work and can’t afford to go anywhere. Then there’s that pandemic thing… Yet it’s amazing what a week away, without electronic connection,…
Saying No to Freelance Writing Prospects
A conversation I started on a LinkedIn forum went something like this: This has been on my mind a while. And with so many writers struggling (some of them for longer than imaginable), I thought this topic might be appropriate. Writers, it’s time you become picky. Ask yourself these questions: 1: When was the last…
Writing Without Racism
This shouldn’t be a difficult post to write. And yet, it is. In 2020, we all watched it happen. As we watched a man murdered, we watched something else happen, too. Our world woke up to what millions of people have already known — racism is alive and festering. Worse, in the last decade, it…