I had the opportunity earlier this month to be a panelist at the Vocus User Conference here in Washington DC. All the flacks wanted to hear what the Future of Media looks like from a freelance perspective…and out of all the freelancers in the DC area, they chose me. I’m humbled. I’ll be honest with [...]
As some of you already know, this year I’m making the transition from “writer, editor, and blogger” to “writer, editor, blogger, and author. That’s right. I am gonna sell a book this year, darn it! As part of that goal, I’ve added a bunch of agent blogs and writing blogs to my RSS reader, figuring [...]
That’s right, folks, I’ve finished Nanowrimo 2009 with a steampunk story starring the spunkiest wrench wench ever to walk the streets of New Bombay. Considering the speed at which I churned out either 50,419 words or 50,093 words (depending on whether you believe Nanowrimo’s word counter or Scrivener‘s), I’m actually happy with the way the [...]
This post came my way courtesy of the hive mind (Delicious popular bookmarks) and it was worth a mention: how to outline a big piece. Meranda of Meranda Writes posts her outlining method here. It’s analog and oldschool, but effective…she writes each “fact” on a post-it note sliver and rearranges. I did something like this [...]
I’ve “read” (skimmed) two books in the last few days: Be The Media and The Four-Hour Workweek. They’ve gotten me thinking about quite a few things. Despite the totally different audiences and topics, the books are fundamentally about the same thing: You, you brilliant snowflake you, can break out of the molds The Man’s put [...]
I thought this piece from Edward Wasserman at the Society of American Business Writers and Editors was very pertinent to today’s world. In essence, he says, today’s journalism comes from interested citizens, freelancers who may do other, non-journalism writing on the side, and writers funded by direct advertising, grants, or some other model. In other [...]
Here’s a horror story for freelancers out there. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I was at a media professionals mixer the other day, chatting with a number of TV journalists and writers. Then I saw a woman making her way through the crowd, staring at nametags. She grabbed this guy behind me [...]
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A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield My review rating: 4 of 5 starsA fascinating study of words *as people actually use them.* Most books on language do not have the power of the Corpus behind them, which is what makes Damp Squid so special. This book is written for a [...]
Image via Wikipedia My Tuesday posts have been lacking, I know, but that’s because I’ve started blogging at mediabistro.com’s MediaJobsDaily. So instead of a list of markets and freelance opportunities this week, I’d like to highlight a few tech tools I’ve found indispensable for my new role as breaking-news-blogger and social media maven. Twitlet – [...]