Category — The Writing Life

This isn’t a shock since I haven’t posted in two weeks and barely in the last month. It’s more accurately “gone” not “going” I suppose.

This blogging drought is largely due to having so many clients at the moment that I have work coming out of my ears. I’m certainly not going to write a bunch of blog entries when I have clients paying me to meet deadlines with high-quality work.

It’s a good problem to have most days. It’s made even better by the fact that I’m working with some great clients who are doing wonderful work. It’s a very creative time for me. And I get paid to do all this. On top of that, it’s spring! How great is that?

At some point, I’m going to pick up the project of the much-needed redesign of my current professional site. Little secret of freelance web designers and writers – our sites rarely ever get touched because we’re building sites for everyone else.

I have some big projects in the pipeline for the summer, so I feel like I’m jumping into a great season in my freelance life. Great projects are coming to me; what a gift! Back in the 8-to-5 world, people often dump thankless projects on you. Mmmmm. That’s fresh air I smell over here; come outside all ye cube-dwellers!

So between family, clients, getting my business more organized, grabbing some time to write stories, and other important, day-to-day stuff, blogging is ranking about 9th. Someday I’ll be one of those people who blog about as naturally as they breathe and crank out insightful posts over morning cereal. I’m not there yet.

I will post from time to time in the lulls in the action that I hope will appear. Someday I hope to be a ‘regular’ at this. There’s so much I want to write about, but slapping up some half-written stuff in a blog doesn’t seem that edifying to the world to me.

In the meantime, my advice: Keep the pen moving; everything else will take care of itself.

In the midst of the chaos of juggling a million things in the last week, I’ve had one important revelation. My organization system (or general lack thereof) is severely affecting the time I have to meet my writing goals and my personal and work commitments. I meet my deadlines, of course, but I’ve found that’s come at the expense of sleep, personal downtime, and, particularly, my non-work writing.

So I decided to punt everything that wasn’t essential in the last week and focus on developing a better system. The problem was that so much was essential last week that this was really hard, but I finally ‘got it’ that one of the best times to buckle down and get organized is in the middle of a lot of chaos.

Despite some significant deadlines, an emergency trip to the dentist, and a sick kid, I actually got all this other stuff done.

• I deleted over 10,000 e-mail messages. No kidding.
• While I was at it, I got my Inbox down to ZERO. Admittedly, some of that ended up in an Action Items folder of messages I still need to respond to, but my Inbox was no longer a dumping ground for piles of mismatched pieces of information.
• My Inbox has stayed at zero because I’ve been processing that e-mail regularly. Setting my ‘automatically check e-mail’ interval to one hour instead of five minutes has done wonders. It no longer interrupts me and I can process it more efficiently when it comes in.
• I dumped everything I had in my brain for projects, action items, future tasks, anything I’d like to do but haven’t started on, calls I need to make, plans for world peace, and anything else that popped into my head down on to paper. Man, that felt good.
• I stashed little notebooks and notepads all over the house, in my pack, in the car, and anywhere else I might be. A notepad and a writing instrument are never more than 10 feet from me. Whenever I think of it, whatever ‘it’ is, I write it down. If I’m driving, I record it on a pocket recorder. It sounds obsessive, but my mind is so much more relaxed knowing I don’t have to remember something important until I find a place to get it down on.
• I took that entire brain dump and organized it into categories of projects, where ‘projects’ could be work-related, personal, or anything in between.
• I organized a big chunk of my project folders on my hard drive into groupings that made better sense.
• I made a calendar entry to remind myself to review those project and home lists regularly.

The end result? I’ve been frighteningly efficient the last couple of days. My mind feels a lot more relaxed. I had a really good Monday. You can’t beat that.

I even made some progress on a novel I’ve been working on. I got with it enough to do some research that’s been blocking me there for a long time.

If you’ve read time management books, you may already know the method I’m playing around with. Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method developed by David Allen that is by far the best approach I’ve come across. I’ve had to tweak it some to meet my style, but so far, it’s been a real load off my mind to follow it.

To borrow some more David Allen, the process of dumping the contents of your brain on to paper serves to offload your “psychic RAM”. Again, it felt great because instead of having to lug all that around in my head, it was down somewhere where I could locate it later.

This strikes me as an approach that fits naturally with how writers work. We carry around a ridiculous amount of stuff in our heads from bits of dialogue to plot ideas to nice phrases to solutions to sticky problems that have been plaguing us for weeks. Getting it down is a huge relief.

Working out the discrete steps required to keep a project moving along has been extremely helpful as well. Instead of “Create this web site” – which you can’t do without performing dozens of steps – I started figuring out very specifically what those steps were, especially those I need to do next. Instead of seeing a project with a hundred steps and a fuzzy sense of where to go next, I had the next actions right there ready to be tackled.

I don’t know what would happen if you locked David Allen and Anne Lamott in a room together, but GTD seems a lot like Bird by Bird to me. You write about only that little slice of the world that you can see through your one-inch picture frame; you complete that one small task on a big project. That’s how you complete a novel, a web site, or whatever else you’re working on.

Related Sites: 43 Folders | Lifehacker

March 4th is National Grammar Day! It’s so great that it even has its own web site. Not surprisingly, it’s NationalGrammarDay.com. I just discovered this site and haven’t had a chance to look at it much, but it’s chock-full of grammar goodness and Internet resources. Go check it out.

It wouldn’t be National Grammar Day without a little wisdom from Grammar Girl. Go read her Top Ten Grammar Myths transcript in honor of this day.

Shameless self-promotion – you can also read my Guide to Improving Your Writing and Grammar on my main site!

Celebrate with Grammatical Turkey Chili or a Grammartini! Just don’t take a red pen to the grocery store and edit their signs. You may get arrested.

While just getting something published – even in a non-paying market – can be fun and rewarding, neither you nor I are going to turn down some cold, hard cash for our writing.

While something like Writer’s Market is an invaluable resource for breaking into paying markets, it’s also intimidating. There are plenty of smaller, friendlier-feeling, new-writer-welcoming markets out there far too numerous to make it into Writer’s Market. Keeping up with these opportunities requires a personal touch and a passion for helping all writers succeed.

That’s where C. Hope Clark’s FundsforWriters.com comes in. Every two weeks, Hope sends out a newsletter that lists grant opportunities and well-paying markets and contests only. At a ridiculously cheap $12/year, you can’t beat it.

I heard her in an interview a while back and love her spirit and commitment to her work and to writers everywhere. She has a ton of material on her site, so go have a look.

I recently discovered the FreelanceSwitch blog, and it easily made it onto my daily reading list. Their purpose is to offer advice, share their wisdom, and create a community atmosphere for freelancers everywhere. It’s a place where freelancers can work together to overcome the challenges of freelancing and find ways to improve their chances of success.

Definitely check out their recent article “How Much is Your Time Worth?”, the ever-present issue that freelancers everywhere wrestle with.

I’ve only explored a fraction of their extensive site so far. Go now and check it out!

I’ve read a lot of advice over the years that writers should focus on getting the words right and leave the graphic designers to deal with fonts and the other pretty stuff. Employed writers often work as part of a diverse team where everyone has a specific role. Writers who work at ‘non-writing jobs’ and write stories and poems in between the nooks and crannies of their day often don’t have time to worry about anything else.

With the proliferation of self-employment and self-publishing, it’s getting harder and harder for writers to just write copy or stories. Competition for freelance work can be fierce. The more writing and design services you can (legitimately) offer, the more likely you are to get work. The more design work you can do on your book, the better it’s going to sell. If you rely on self-publishing houses to do your design work for you, expect much more often than not to be disappointed.

What I find fascinating is that graphic designers are typically much more willing to write copy for the pieces they create – such as brochures – than copywriters are to offer a design to go with their copy. Traditionally, these have been two separate fields and remain so in many places. A great designer who can write adequate copy or a great writer who can at least do adequate design are instantly more marketable.

Does this mean you should punt outside help from anyone? Of course not. But if you seek outside design help, you should know enough to know the right questions to ask and to evaluate how good that help is.

I feel that the days of just providing straight copy to a client are quickly waning. In talking with prospective clients, I discover that many of them have received bids for just writing the text for their project leaving them to wonder, “you mean I have to find somebody else to do the design and printing?”

I think if you bid on a job to produce an e-mail newsletter, you ought to know how to actually create and lay one out in HTML as well as how to use a couple of online services who help companies distribute those newsletters. The copy in those newsletters is still the most important part, but most clients I’ve talked to or worked with want more than a Word document with the copy in it. They want the project done so all they have to do is click Send.

That said, there are still plenty of places that want the copy and then want you to go away. That’s fine. They’re set up for that kind of process. I think, though, that there are ten orders of magnitude more places that would hire you if you could take them from beginning to “click Send”.

If you dread learning the skills needed to do that, then don’t. Aim for places that just want the copy. I’ve just found that I have a lot more options if I can provide more services. It helps tremendously that I love learning this stuff, and it gives me a place to express my creativity in those areas.

It feels good when talking to clients to say, “I write and…” Your “and” should be something you love, or are at least fascinated by, that also adds value to your writing services. That “and” will get you work.

So, what’s your “and”?

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded this day in 1986. In a few years, my son will probably have to come home and ask us where we were when certain historical events happened. He and the kids in his class will not believe that their parents could remember exactly what they were doing last week let alone years and years ago.

I was in 7th grade and we were out of school that day because of snow. I was watching “The Price is Right” and putting my dishes in the sink after having a late breakfast of pancakes when the CBS Special Report flashed on. I watched TV all day after that.

I also remember one other part of that day.

Tonight is The State of the Union Address, which will most likely be another laundry list of things that won’t come to pass and one that few will remember. It’s difficult to remember the last SotU speech that actually had something both memorable and positive in it.

I do remember Reagan’s speech that day 21 years ago and that still-famous line:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God.”

That speech was written by Peggy Noonan and certainly was a career-maker for her. As writers, we hope for even a single, inspired day like that. Regardless of what you think of Reagan, he knew how to deliver the words his speechwriters gave him.

The quoted pieces come from the poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. Magee died at the age of 19 in World War II. This is easily his most famous poem, though few outside the aviation world have ever heard of him.

Click the above link, scroll down, and read the entire poem. There’s a reason why it means something special to military aviators everywhere.

Even though there are still 11 or so shopping months until next Christmas/Hanukkah, I figured I’d get a jump on it by releasing the print version of my holiday short story That Day in the Manger (PDF, in a new window), which was broadcast on The Writing Show last month. (Direct link to that show)

I wanted to point people solely to Paula’s site for a while since she was gracious enough to have me on the show. Please do spread a little site traffic love and visit The Writing Show’s web site. Every writer should subscribe to her podcast. I was a long-time listener even before I was on the show, so no bias here!

I don’t think that anyone who writes and freelances for a living ever really takes a vacation. My plan has been to take the last two weeks of the year “off” to spend time with family and friends. Holidays are hardly the way to be “off” and take the kind of restful vacation we need, but on the whole it’s been good for renewing myself and my creativity. At least for this holiday season, taking time off has mostly involved not being at my computer much at all, which has been a refreshing change.

My son tried out a few new words this week, particularly with all the attention – and, therefore, words – he gets from everyone. With all of the speech barriers he has to overcome, every new word he says is a gift greater than any you could wrap and put under our tree.

My days are filled with words, and for the most part they come pretty easily for me. For my son, they don’t. He works extremely hard for each new word and earns every one of them. When a word clicks in his head and he gets it out, his face lights up with pure joy. Not surprisingly, so does mine.

The holidays are meant for wonder. Perhaps as adults we’ve lost much of that innate capacity for wonder that children have. Being with him when he discovers a new word is one of the multitude of ways he’s helped me find that sense again. He’s made me realize that I take language for granted. This week, he’s taught me to appreciate how wonderful ‘banana’ (uh-NAH-nuh!) and ‘knee’ are.

What did I do over my Christmas vacation? I learned that sounding every syllable of every word very carefully and slowly, over and over again, is to unearth the beauty of language all over again. Even more than that, I realized that watching my son discover it for the very first time is to stand on holy ground.

I published a set of beliefs and statements on my web site that define much about who I am and what I believe about my work. Feel free to read the My Philosophy or Feel Good About Hiring Me sections.

I’m including a few more here. Maybe these are like the deleted scenes bonus section!

• Having a child has made me a better writer and designer. My son makes me pay attention to every little thing, and then name it 42 times. He’s wise beyond his years, too.
• Coffee makes the world a better place. Fair trade coffee makes it even better.
• The optimal temperature for writing and designing is about 74 degrees Fahrenheit. A slight northerly breeze helps.

People ask me how I manage working from home and being a stay-at-home parent. It’s not easy. I don’t really have a typical workday. The list below is more the good life stuff that flows in and through my work projects. Remembering them keeps me feeling good about how the chaos is working out these days.

• I walk to work, which consists of approximately eight steps. My carbon footprint is low. My web site is carbon neutral thanks to offsets.
• I take breaks by reading to my son and taking him out for a walk.
• I make an ongoing game out of trying to recycle everything in the house.
• I listen to Garrison Keillor every day and try to pass on a bit of his goodness to others.
• I don’t have a personal trainer.
• I can recite Dr. Seuss’s ABCs book by memory.
• I’m on pace to memorize a half-dozen Sandra Boynton books by year’s end. She may now be the torch-bearer for the Seussian tradition.

What are the little things that seep into your day that make you feel better about it?