A dog day of summer – Take your dog to work!
Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day, as I learned from the Mental Floss e-newsletter. Launched in 1999, the day celebrates “the great companions dogs make” and encourages adoption from humane societies, animal shelter and breed rescue clubs. We didn’t...3 flies walk into a bar and other Twitter stories
What a great exercise in telling a story and setting a mood, in a tight framework too! I’m talking about the Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest. The goal: Write a story in exactly 140 characters (the length of a post on Twitter, aka a tweet). Not more,...
Brain food makes expressive writing
Talk about a deft turn of phrase! Spotted in an interesting article in the Toronto Star called “Patient gets brain surgery – fully awake,” by Joseph Hall: “Glioma, as it is also known, is a whack-a-mole cancer, with tumours that are treated or...Get out and network
One of the things I encourage new freelancers to do is get out and network. Established freelancers, too! Working in a home office can be as lonely as it is liberating. Just as you should spend some time every week on marketing your business – yes, even when you are...Words this week
I ran across a couple of words this week (on Word Spy and Buzz Whack) that particularly appealed to me: Staycation. When you spend your vacation at home. (Thanks to high gas prices and a sluggish economy, it’s all many of us can afford.) Also known to those of...How to choose a writing sample
If you are a blogger, consider yourself patted on the back by Anne Holland, Content Director of MarketingSherpa. She encourages bloggers in the May 12 newsletter (see #9) thusly: “Starting a blog is easy. Keeping the blog going for more than a few months is...
Networking tips from “Never Eat Alone”
Networking gets a bad rap. Really, if you go about it the right way, you don’t have to break into a cold sweat. Forget the (bad) advice to go in and give out as many business cards as possible and try to come away with work leads. Instead, look on each...Live the life you want to live
Yesterday marked the birthday of Queen Victoria, who reigned when Canada was born. It’s a classic Canadian holiday, dubbed “May two-four” in a nod to both the date (the Monday closest to May 24) and the ceremonial purchasing and consuming of at least...