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Tag: "freelancing"

What’s on your writing desk?

A few days ago, Anne Wayman wrote a blog post listing what was on her writing desk. I thought I’d respond with a post of my own, though I’m afraid my list isn’t as exciting as hers. We do have an office, but I actually do most of my work in the living room – better light. As such, my “writing desk” here will really be “coffee table.”

  • My laptop support thing. I have no idea what these are actually called, but it’s pillowy underneath with a flat surface on top. It sits on my lap and my laptop sits on top of it. Good for when my laptop gets warm from the intensity of my writing (or something).
  • An empty mug of tea. A friend of mine brought it back from the UK and it’s oversized and lovely.
  • A copy of Why Do We Say It?, a book given to me by a fellow word-liker friend. He and I used to sit next to each other at work, and almost every day we would come across some phrase everyone takes for granted, like “flash in the pan” and wonder how it entered our lexicon. We also used to proofread junk faxes our office received, which often had hilarious grammatical errors. Oh, good times indeed! I’m reading it again to harvest the best ones for a blog post.
  • The second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography – blog post coming about that too.
  • My cell phone, battery low.
  • A notebook and pen. I bought this notebook to prove to myself once and for all that I don’t like perfect-bound notebooks. I still don’t, but I will power through.
  • An Xbox 360 controller for when it’s time to take a break!
January 29, 2010 | 3 comments | View Post

My favourite blog posts of 2009

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:

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)

December 31, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

Out with the old, etc.

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:

What are you planning for 2010?

December 22, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

Quotes on writing and art

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!

December 17, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

James Chartrand, pen names and our backwards world

A lot of blogs I read have been talking about this post on Copyblogger: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the gist: Female writer struggles to find writing gigs worthy of her skills and education, so after a process of trial and error, she chooses a pen name which happens to be male.

James’ blog is one I read fairly often, for a while, so at first this announcement felt kind of like a real-life episode of Coronation Street (not a bad thing, mind). Others have written about it quite well. For me, it got me thinking about pen names in general. Some of you may remember my own failed attempt at a pen name. Basically, I could never remember to use it, even though it was just my intials, “SK,” instead of “Samantha.” Part of the reason I chose that name was for privacy, yes. But honestly, another reason I chose it was because it was gender ambiguous. I was enchanted by the idea of someone reading my work with absolutely no preset gender bias. My little pen name experiment obviously didn’t last, but part of me wonders how my career would be different if it had.

Despite what I just said, to be honest, part of me is always a little upset when I hear of things like this. I have a possibly naive belief that, as a woman, I should be able to pursue any career I want and be treated 100 percent the same as anyone else. But I know that in some situations, including James’, it’s just not that easy. So while I wish that we could’ve seen her triumph under her given name, I do completely understand her decision.

Anyway, I just wanted to chime in along with all the other blogs in support of James now and in the future.

December 14, 2009 | 3 comments | View Post

Finding writing discipline

I received a spam comment that said, among other things, “not clear to me how often you are updating your site.” You and me both, buddy!

Anyway. Things in my writing life have been going pretty well. I have been doing a lot more social media/blog writing for my part-time job, and I’ve been realizing how much I enjoy writing about marketing! My work experience has been in the marketing & communications field, two related yet different areas. Communications was always the clear favourite for me, but there’s something about marketing that makes it fun to write about. Maybe it’s because I enjoy strategy so much, and that’s what a lot of marketing writing deals with.

artandfearIn fiction-writing news, I’ve been sticking diligently to a schedule of writing one hour per day, at least. I’m so bad at that when it comes to fiction writing. I’m on top of things with my freelancing, but forget about it when it comes to my own writing! I’ve known a lot of people who pursue their hobby/interest professionally, then find the focus shifts sharply away from their personal practice. It seems I’m no different.

My husband’s coworker lent me a great book that’s been helping me stick to my new discipline training. It’s called Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Normally I don’t go in for self-help style books, but when it comes to writing self-help books, I can’t resist! It’s been a very rewarding read – so rewarding that I think I’ve kept it much longer than is polite to keep a borrowed book! Yikes!

December 11, 2009 | 1 comment | View Post
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