Thanks to Head Butler for turning me on to this brilliant anti-bullying video and song from Cypress Ranch High School in Texas. What’s so great about it? It’s not groundbreaking music or filmmaking. It’s not the first orchestrated high school video or anti-bullying campaign or message. But it is great viral marketing. A perfect example [...]
I’ve been answering questions this week on balance in your writing life, and on achieving your goals with writing. While I definitely don’t have all the answers, one of my go-to exercises for writers and anyone who has ever worked for me is what I call the Resume Recheck exercise (more on that next week). [...]
Kassia Kroszer said, in response to Porter Anderson’s questions about her manifesto on ebooks titled A Reader’s Bill of Rights, that cheap self-publishing doesn’t harm the industry but the individual: For self-published authors, they aren’t really driving the cost of the market down as much as they are driving their own worth down. It’s pretty clear [...]
True words about photographs in a digital age, and how critical it has become to select and print only those few that are good, that serve a purpose or meet our needs: We edit for our audiences, real or virtual. If we share too much, people shut us out. If we share well, people become [...]
If you work in a medium or large company, you probably have someone in-house whose job it is to write for you. Or part of their job. Maybe a whole department. Chances are, that person or department is also overwhelmed. In my experience non-writers in large companies don’t understand writing and think it’s an easy, [...]
Last Saturday I told a roomful of people that they needed to start treating their personal creative writing as though it were paid professional writing. Because frankly, otherwise most of us writers tend to let our writing be treated as a hobby, which means we let work, family, friends, the overdue closet-cleaning, and our neighbor’s [...]
Our panel at AWP was about finding balance between your professional or paid writing life and your personal creative writing. Funny that some days I seem to fail miserably at this. Like today. I’m reminded now, after seven solid hours of fighting with PHP code and my ISP’s server settings, that my mantra as a [...]
I tell clients to start a blog only if they intend to write things their target reader will really want to read. They manage this for a while. Then they run out of things to say on the topic they’ve chosen, or begin to use the blog like a free press-release distribution site to promote [...]
I tell my clients how and when to blog, but I never get around to doing it for myself. My creativity goes into my clients’ projects and my creative nonfiction, not a blog. But this is where I post anything I feel the need to share, so feel free to read. Or not.