Archives: June 2006

Mark Twain was a funny guy. He was an editor as well as a writer, and he put together a few different anthologies in his day. The Mark Twain Library of Humor is a great one that features several stories about writing. It’s readily available in bookstores and libraries if you want to read a physical copy. Because the copyrights are long expired, you can also find many of the stories online. If you aren’t going to set goals this weekend, maybe you’d like to read instead.
Charles Dudley Warner’s The Plumber (page down to see it) has some timeless advice on setting rates. Twain’s How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once will seem familiar to those who have written for trades; you can even listen to it if you are too tired to read. And if you have never read Twain, get right over to Project Gutenberg to see what’s there.
If you want to do some typing, Wikisource is looking for folks to enter the stories there, as many of those written by other authors have not been collected online. I was trying to find Eugene Field’s wickedly funny “The First Day at Editing”, but I could not. But trust me, PR freebies and the folks who live for them are not a new development.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.

If you are going to set goals this weekend, and if you like the idea of breaking each into a series of discrete actions that you can start taking now, you might like David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I love it, and so the the good folks at Lifehacker. Today, Lifehacker discusses the iCommit Web-based application for hard-core GTD.

You know my theory that successful freelancers have either kids or dogs to keep them on schedule? Jen Miller agrees. “I adopted myself a dog in December, in part because I work at home all day long, and she forces me to get out,” Jen says. “Emily (who I also call my ‘boss’) is a jack russell terrier/something mix, and she forces me to take a break instead of sitting at my desk all day long. Plus, whenever I’m stuck, I take her for a walk. Sometimes she gets A LOT of walks!”
That’s Emily up in the corner. Does your dog also keep you on track? What about your kids? Do you have a non-dog, non-kid method that works for you? Tell me about it – I’d love to hear it. annielogue@gmail.com

If you grew up in Cleveland, you’re familiar with one of the local television institutions, Academic Challenge. I was on my school’s team, oh so many years ago. One cold Sunday, my family got bundled up in the station wagon and made the drive from Youngstown to Cleveland so that I could make my television debut. The host was Don Webster, who also pulled the daily lottery numbers, and my little brother could not believe that he was in the presence of such greatness.
Although no tape of my appearance exists, I can say this much: I wasn’t the person who froze on camera and caused our team to come in second.
Huh? Are you trapped on TV Newser? Not at all. I bring this up because I recently talked to a potential client about writing stories for multi-media presentations, and the writer might have to appear on camera to read them. Would I feel comfortable doing that? Uh, sure, why not?
MBToolbox.com’s own Claire Zulkey has sometimes been called up on share her wit and wisdom with the viewing audience. Like my potential client, many modern writing projects use a range of available media, not just words, to tell a story. And, of course, we all dream about having our book featured on Oprah.
The basic advice that I learned on my afternoon at the WEWS-Cleveland studios is this: wear solid colors, apply lots of makeup (or at least use powder), and look at the camera or at Don Webster, not the camera operator, the production team, or your friends in the studio audience. Here’s some advice from the producers of GOV-TV in Albuquerque and some advice from a school district in Colorado.
And if you want to be on Oprah? Well, the producers make it easy. Here’s the list of upcoming shows. If you have a book or project that fits one of their topics, you can just let the producers know, and you’re on your way to West Randolph Street!

One of the many things that I love about my job is that I get paid to go out and talk to interesting people and learn new things. Earlier this month, I was covering a trade show here in Chicago. I would sit in sessions, take notes, and then write up stories for the newspaper that was handed out to participants each morning. One of the sessions that I saw was entirely about setting goals. The audience was made up of top sales people, and they were learning how to do their jobs better.
This is what I learned:
First, the biggest limiting factor we face is what we think is possible or impossible. If you think that it is impossible to have a book published in three years, or to support yourself as a freelancer by this time next year, or to ever have a story published in the New Yorker, well then, it will be. The way to get over the hurdle is to list all of the steps that you need to do to get to the goal, then add them to your to-do list so that you have a plan to meet them.
For example, if you want to quit your job to freelance, you need to figure out the minimum amount of money you need to live on. What books do you need to read, who do you need to talk to, what records do you need to keep, to figure out what this is? Then, put these items on your calendar so that you do them and move closer to your goal.
To set those goals, presenter had us do a worksheet exercise. He handed out a list of forty questions, ranging from things like “What kind of house would I like to live in?”, “How much do I want to weigh?”, and “Who would I like to be friends with?” to “How much money do I want to make next year?” and “How many employees do I want to have?” and “How many clients would I like to have?”. Once we got these answers, we were to pick out six goals, three personal and three professional, in order to keep balance in our lives.
It’s a useful exercise, coming up with goals and working out the steps that must be taken to achieve them. If you have a few hours to spare this weekend, why not take the time to write your own list, pick the goals that interest you most right now, and then work out a plan to achieve them?

It’s time to check in with everyone’s favorite current professional literary editor, Miss Snark. This week, we learn the answer to the burning question of the ages, do literary agents ever comb Craigslist in search of new talent?
No.
(I, however, found one of my best clients ever through Craigslist, and several other smart clients offering well-paying assignments that way. Don’t rule it out when looking for freelance work, just remember that those few great gigs were far between.)
She also has these thoughts on the oh-so-controversial topic of writing for free or for cheap, namely that if you are going to do it, be selective about who you agree to give your work to. “Having someone who is not your mom say your work doesn’t suck is what reassures me,” she says; simply writing for any Web site that looks at you twice isn’t enough to impress a literary agent about your literary worth.

My friend Jan sent a great joke yesterday. You may have heard it before, but it’s still good.
A college writing instructor gave this assignment. Each student was to write a story in as few words as possible, featuring three elements: religion, sex, and mystery. The top-scoring story:
“Dear God, I’m pregnant! I wonder who did it?”
Okay, back to work.

There have been a few news stories recently about laptop computer theft. Yes, you can buy a laptop lock, but be careful – some of them are super crummy, but they might deter the opportunistic thief. And be sure to lock it to something secure. In a hotel room without a laptop-sized safe, lock it to the pipes under the bathroom sink.
LabMice.net has laptop security tips that are geared toward IT folks, but aren’t freelancers our own IT folks?
If you deal with incredibly sensitive data, you can get a token system like those made by Cryptocard. I first saw one of these used by a friend who works for an organization that had some data security issues a few years back. It’s not cheap stuff, but it could be a bargain for some people.
I don’t keep any data of any consequence on my laptop: it’s all on my thumb drive, on my desktop, or sent to one of my email addresses. That way, if the laptop is gone, the files are not. If you need to keep data on your laptop, use passwords. They aren’t perfect, but they are better than nothing.
One other thing: if you sign a contract with a liability clause, put client data on your laptop, and then the laptop gets stolen, you might have a big problem. Keep that in mind if you sign liability clauses and if you have any client data.

I admit it. I have never mastered the difference between “lie” and “lay”. I wish the powers that be would just issue a pronouncement changing those words forever. My usual tactic is to simply write around them, using “set” and “recline” instead. Those words, you can keep straight.
I found a few sources that might help, if you are similarly challenged. English-Zone.com has a handy lay-lie quiz; I scored 70% – not great. Sometimes it helps to see the words used in sentence form. That makes more sense to me than trying to remember what a transitive verb is. Likewise, you might find this long explanation helpful, but it just confused me. Gerald Grow at the Florida A&M has put together some more comprehensive exercises that might help, too.
Now, I need to go set my head on a pillow and recline on the couch after all that.

My son is eight. Every day, he comes home from camp and asks me if the library called yet. He is on the waiting list for “Henry and Ribsy”, and he can’t wait to read it, especially after he loved “Henry Huggins” so much.
Beverly Cleary’s much-beloved book celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, which would make third-grader Henry 59. Can you believe that? Talk about a series that aged well! Sure, most kids no longer have to go through the torture of going to the fabric store to look at patterns, but they still wonder where Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom and they aren’t quite sure what a dawnzer is, although it does give a lee light.
But here’s the thing that gets me the most right now: Beverly Cleary was 40 when “Henry Huggins” was published. I’m 40 right now, almost 41. And some days, I pick up the paper and see that one of my classmates from college or business school is doing something really spectacular, and I get really bummed. My alumni magazine just profiled a 24-year-old who had a story in the New Yorker last year (a good one, too) and novel coming out now, and my first thought was raging jealousy. Why can’t that be me? Am I completely washed up?
And then I think about Beverly Cleary, who is 90, who wrote a book 50 years ago when she was 40, and I think about how much my son loved the adventures of Ramona and Beezus, Henry and Ralph S. Mouse, just as I did as a kid. And I realize, once again, that the world is very strange and random, and that more good things will happen to me, even though I am 40.
And good things will happen to you, too.
This little essay isn’t about freelancing per se, except that we’re all working alone in a competitive business, and that’s hard. It’s really easy to get down on yourself. I do it a lot. I am not optimistic by nature. I can’t devote my life to my art, because I have to do a day camp pick up at 4:30 and then make supper. So that’s why I like stories of people who did great things on their own time, and I like stories of people like Beverly Cleary who have created so much happiness from their writing. This is a hard profession, but a good one.