Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

Yup, this is another end-of-2009 blog post!

A paid-for URL, a few redesigns and some hilarious spam – this blog’s seen a lot in 2009! I took a quick look back at some of my earlier posts and thought I’d share some of my personal highlights from Wordscience. Here are the blog posts I liked the most in 2009:

• My Life With Robertson Davies
• Office Culture for the Self-Employed
• Three Ways my Mother Can Help you be a Better Freelancer
• How the Web Has Changed Since “My Day”
• Three Ways to Find Writing Motivation When You Just Don’t Care
• Quotes on Writing and Art

Oh, this one’s not a post of mine, but I kind of wish it was, given my Spelling Thing: Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling from The Oatmeal.

I hope everyone has/is having a great New Year’s Eve!

(Photo from stock.xchng user Staszkinse)

Or, well, almost new year.

So, as you can see, I’ve revamped my website. I’m really excited about it and I absolutely love the template I found (details are at the bottom of the page). I really like that there are different templates for blog pages and for non-blog pages, meaning my tag cloud and archives won’t appear on the Home, About Me or Contact pages. Plus, I got to play with cufón, which my inner web design nerd loved.

Anyway, I hope everyone’s had a fun and/or relaxing holiday, to suit your tastes. My own was relaxing, full of good food and good movies with my husband. However, I was back to work yesterday, freelancing wise. I’m not complaining, though – editing projects completed on my couch while a Sarah’s House marathon plays in the background? Far more preferable to any other work situation I can think of!

I’m nearly 30 and haven’t published my first book yet, so it’s no surprise that I love stories about other writers who publish late. There’s another such story from The Independent:

The story, a partially autobiographical account by Shapton, a 36-year-old Canadian-born art director at the New York Times, charts the doomed arc of a love affair between the central characters, Doolan, a food writer, and Morris, a British photographer.

Their romance is revealed through a series of 1,332 lots offered for sale at a fictitious auction house on Valentine’s Day, 2009. Each lot, including photographs (Shapton’s friends posed as Doolan and Morris), emails, letters, clothes, a cookery book and a set of aprons, reveals key moments of their passion for each other.

Full article here. There’s still hope for writers like me who like to let ideas percolate!

Last year, I worked at a job where Christmas was A Big Deal – the biggest deal of the whole year, in fact. I spent much of December traveling, working late and eating poorly. Surprising no-one, I was more stressed out than I’d ever been in my life. I was overworked, spread too thin and highly unfulfilled.

In 2009, I started freelancing full-time. I’d been a freelance writer for several years, but always when I had time left over after my day job. I was always afraid to commit full time to freelance writing. I loved it, I was great at it, but there were always excuses – primarily money-related.

One day this year, my husband and I were walking to our respective jobs. We were almost at the street where we would part ways and I was talking about how the thought of turning down that street was tying my stomach into knots. It wasn’t a new topic of conversation. In fact, it was so frequent it was bordering on annoying for the both of us. Except on this day, instead of listening and trying to calm me down, my husband told me that my happiness was worth more to him than the salary I was working too hard for every day. He told me he would support me if I wanted to try freelancing full-time.

In the days that followed, we worked out budgets and discussed my plans. I revamped my existing website and got started. I was lucky enough to find a few clients pretty quickly, and they were great clients. I got to work with them on projects they were passionate about, projects they were starting to help others. One of these clients even offered me a part-time writing job. That was not only a source of steady income, but made me feel pretty good about the quality of work I’d done for them.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all smooth sailing – I got stiffed on a $30 invoice, for instance – but it’s been worth it. This year, I finally got to do something I’ve always wanted to do but didn’t believe possible.

I’m excited about 2010. I’ve been discovering what I’m good at and what I’d rather not do. I’m making plans for the next year. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does involve a site revamp, because I can spend many happy hours looking at Wordpress templates. I plan to have that done as early in January as possible and I’m excited!

Here are a couple of other year-end posts I’ve been reading:

• Annual Review: 2009 Life Lessons at the Art of Non-Conformity.
• Don’t Wait Until January 1st to Plan Your Freelance Writing Strategy for the New Year at the FWJ Network.

What are you planning for 2010?

This weekend was spent with a few fun people I know in a small-town B&B cabin. It was meant to be a ski trip, but only two people went to the mountain. The rest of us spent time in a coffeeshop in an old church, and browsing a very small but very amazing secondhand book store. There was good food, board games, lots of loud laughing – all ingredients of a great trip! My husband and I left Friday and returned yesterday morning. We were tired and relaxed and it took some time do “recompress” and come back to real life.

When I returned, I checked my usual links (that I’d ignored over the weekend) and saw that the Freelance Writing Jobs Network posted this: From a Man with a Pen to a Lady with a LapTop: An Inteview with Deb Dorchak a/k/a Harrison McLeod. It seems that Deb D was the person who “outed” James Chartrand.

I’m not going to comment too much on it here, as I know this story is already huge. I jokingly compared it to a soap opera in my last post about it, but real people are involved and I don’t want to stir any pots or whatever metaphor you like to use. I just wanted to link to another part of the story since I’d brought it up earlier.

Anyway, go check out the post on the Freelance Writing Jobs Network. Deb N does an admirable job with it, considering both parties involved are friends of hers!

I’ve finished Art & Fear, that book about artmaking I talked about in a previous post. I’ve returned it to its owner, but not before writing down a few lines that really resonated with me. If you’re a writer or any kind of artist, these might be interesting to you too:

“For years I set aside daytimes for artmaking and evenings for writing; at some point I reversed that schedule, and months passed before I realized my writing had dried up – not for lack of ideas, but because it turns out I process words better at midnight than midday.”

“Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work.”

“Working within the self-imposed discipline of a particular form eases the prospect of having to reinvent yourself with each new piece.”

“New work is supposed to replace old work. If it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete – well, that’s life. (Frank Lloyd Wright advised young architects to plant ivy all around their early buildings, suggesting that in time it would grow to cover their ‘youthful indiscretions.’)”

“Only the maker has a chance of knowing how important small conventions and rituals are in the practice of staying at work.”

“The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done – over and over.”

“Only in these moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it’s not art. Your job is to draw a line from your life to your art that is straight and clear.”

The last three, in particular, were my favourites. I should print them out and read them next time I’m considering taking another fiction workshop instead of writing new stories!