Blog

If someone’s looking for a freelance writer in my area, they’ll have to go to the fourth page of results before finding me. Page 4 out of however many freelance writers isn’t bad, but I’d like to be higher up (so does everyone, right?). So, I may have a long way to go, but here’s what I’ve learned so far. I figure if a novice like me can get even some results with just a week’s worth of tinkering, anyone can do this stuff.

The Onion’s cover was pretty impressive today:  But even more impressive? Open the paper–the WHOLE THING, not including the AV Club, is in this style. I can’t decide if the Burger King (well, the “King of Broil’d Meats”) and the “Jameson’s Miracle Concoction” ads are real, but as far as I can tell, there are [...]

It’s days like today (well, yesterday, but I saw the paper today) that make me really want to be a copy editor at the New York Post. This may be the greatest headline I have ever seen.

Yesterday, some random surfing led me to Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension that promises to “connect the Web with language.” I’ve tried it, and I can say that that description doesn’t even begin to cover it. The video explains this better than I could. But I’ll try anyway. This changes the way people interact with [...]

Updated the site today with a piece from last week’s Getting Ahead (aka the section I edit, aka “my baby,” aka “I love this thing probably far more than necessary.”) What didn’t make it onto the site is a headline I wrote for another freelancer’s Change Artist piece. The guy’s a tour guide in D.C., [...]

The English Spice Index manages to combine my culinary obsession with my etymological one with an enormous list of spices, their common names, their names in 30 or more foreign languages, and of course descriptions of how the spice, herb, or fruit is used. Science nuts can get their fix, too–each spice’s chemical breakdown is [...]

Phew! And at the risk of sounding whiny, that’s all I’ll say about that. You can check out the work of “my” very talented writers online at Express’s new Web site, expressnightout.com. Getting Ahead, my baby, is here and I imagine the other section will be available this Friday when it sees print. Marvel at my [...]

On Saturday, I took a walking tour of local Alexandria restaurants. As much fun as this sounds like it was (and it was), it was work! The write-up will come out at some later date. I don’t want to give too much away ahead of time, but it was a lot of fun and I [...]

Today marks the first day that I’m sending out a query letter not for a magazine or newspaper article but for a book proposal. It’s been more than a year since I put the finishing touches on the first quarter of my manuscript, and then all these things got in the way for both me [...]

Yesterday I attended the Alexandria Archaeology orientation for the summer sessions. This means that I’m now certified to grab a trowel and help excavate artifacts. As I sat in the air-conditioned, church-basement-like room of the George Washington Masonic Memorial, memories from my undergrad archaeology classes came rushing back. Beyond the science of archaeology having some [...]