They’re everywhere these days: illustrating a newspaper article, highlighting a book’s content, offering a glimpse into a web site. Word clouds are great visual signals for what’s inside. Make your own with Wordle, a fun toy created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM Research. Wordle generates word clouds, either from text you’ve cut and pasted or [...]
Tag Archives: Freelance writing
Starting out? Listen to Donna
I’m having lunch later this week with an acquaintance who is considering launching her own business and wants to “pick my brain.” While I don’t claim to know it all, I’ve had my own business for about 18 years, so I must be doing some things right! I’m happy to share my thoughts about what [...]
It’s like magic: referrals help you diversify
If all your money was invested in the stock market, you’d be feeling pretty nervous these days. That’s why financial advisors suggest you diversify — mix it up between stocks, bonds, guaranteed investment certificates and other products with varying degrees of risk and reward. (Then there’s your mattress, which is starting to look just as [...]
Ode to freelance joy
I can’t resist sharing Bill Dyszel’s “freelance national anthem,” about the joys of being a freelance writer. Appropriately enough, it’s sung to Ode to Joy (written by German poet Friedrich Schiller but best known in its musical setting in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). It opens with: “We are full-time freelance writers / what we [...]
Freelancer follies
While Jake and I were out walking the other day, a bird crapped on my head. I’ve heard it’s good luck and maybe that’s true. In my mail that day was payment of an invoice that had been outstanding for months. In my e-mail, promise of more money. Most freelancers aren’t the best at bill [...]
Start your glory file
Here’s a secret about a lot of writers. We have fragile egos. We crave positive feedback, and when we don’t get much (or any), we’re often struck by a feeling of “I’m not as good as [fill in name of admired author here].” I have a Gary Larson cartoon above my desk that captures that [...]
The holy grail of having it all
An appealing recent entry from WordSpy (a web site devoted to “lexpionage,” the sleuthing of new words and phrases) is “stay-at-work mom.” The term refers to a mother who returns to work soon after giving birth. I think it equally applies to those of us who are moms working from home, a situation that I [...]
Just say no
I scared myself last week by turning down two jobs. Two! Before you wonder how well my brain is functioning, let me tell you why I turned away work, and why you should seriously consider doing the same when you have the option. Both jobs had unreasonable deadlines; I would have had to drop everything [...]
5 steps to keep paying the rent
Don’t you almost hate to open a newspaper, watch the news or check your stocks these days? The bad news is unrelenting. Formerly solid companies going bust. Layoffs. Gasoline prices through the roof. Catastrophic weather. It’s definitely an uncertain world we live in. But is it time for independents to worry? It may not be [...]
Overcoming the solo proprieter blues
Les Potter, ABC, communications guru and visiting instructor at Towson University, blogged the other day about the loneliness of the solo communicator and the importance of regular social interaction with fellow professionals. He quotes a couple of songs (“One is the loneliest number”) and then after a few comments, both on the blog and off, [...]
