Age: 34

Location: Morristown, NJ

What are you working on now?
You've caught me at a busy time, amazingly enough. I'm in the middle of doing interviews for an article I'm doing for the New Jersey section of The New York Times; I spent a day with a TV personality and accompanied him as he did some volunteer work, cooked lunch, and went to his favorite fish market. Trust me; it'll be more interesting than it sounds.

I've also started doing more interviews for TV Squad, a AOL/Weblogs, Inc. blog that I write for regularly; for instance, I just got off the phone with an actor/writer from a popular network show, and I'm doing another interview tomorrow. Believe me, getting through the gauntlet of PR people just to line up an interview is a full-time job all by itself.

Now I've got to find a couple of days to transcribe all those
interviews. Or go shove bamboo shoots under my toenails. Whichever one is less painful.

Oh, and there have been some developments with my full-time job (I work as a systems administrator for a monolithic technology corporation), but I don't want to say much more so as to not worry my parents. Let's just say I'll have a lot more time to transcribe interviews.

What's the most helpful thing you've learned about writing?
I used to be much wordier than I am now. When I first started getting published, a lot of what I was doing was op-eds (for my local paper, the Daily Record) and 300-word FOB pieces, so I learned to economize my language to meet the required word counts. Also, I learned that to be funny in my writing -- something I always try to adhere to, unless I'm writing about someone getting fired or something -- I need to keep the unnecessary words to a minimum, so the funny parts have more impact. I don't always succeed; my piles of Shouts & Murmurs and McSweeney's rejections are a testament to that.

What's been the worst career advice you've ever received?
In 2001, I went to a life coach, pretty much desperate for any insight to how I can make my miserable IT career a little less miserable. However, when I expressed an interest in writing, the conversations turned to that. Hey, the woman was trying to help me achieve my dreams, right? Anyway, at the time I had no publication history to speak of, and she was giving me ideas as to how to get people's attention, even though she had never published a word, as far as I knew. You know what she told me? The road to becoming a professional writer was to leave product reviews at Amazon! Oh, and I think she also told me to write reviews on Internet bulletin boards! Even though I had never published a word, I just knew that she was WAAAY off the mark. Call it a hunch. I just nodded and said, "uh huh," and never followed her advice.

But I will say she did get me thinking more about writing, and by 2002, I had my first published piece. So I guess she really *did* do her job, didn't she?

Tell us something you've learned after blogging professionally. What do you know now that you wish you did when you first started at TV Squad?
Well, the only blogging I had done before TV Squad was the test blog I wrote in order to get the job. So when I started, I came out like gangbusters, posting like 5 times a day. But what I found out was that it was extremely difficult to do that many posts in a day. You know where I'm coming from, Claire: I had to write posts that had to be punchy with a sense of humor but also had to clearly convey the idea of the story that it references. Then I had to find an appropriate picture to use (Google Images is my friend) and think of entering the right tags that would allow the post to be found on Google or Technorati. Then, after the post is published, I would go back and obsessively look at the comments and post some myself. And then the next day, I'd have to wake up and start that whole process over again!

It's very easy to lose track of time if you don't learn to pace
yourself. I couldn't keep up the pace I had started with, especially
since I had to devote time to that full-time job. Since TV Squad has a team of writers, I have the freedom to write at the pace I want to
write, even if it means I get paid a little less (I get paid per post).

So now I do 1-3 posts a day, most of which are longer and a little
more in depth. And, like I said, I've started to do more interviews,
too. It makes this more fun and less of a grind for me, which is why I began writing in the first place.