USEFUL THINGS

LinkedIn is a business networking site that offers job searches and international networking.

I use this site frequently to make employment and business connections, to keep up with present clients, to find employment, and to exchange knowledge within my specialties of freelance writing and education.

LinkedIn is a must for business owners and prospective employees.

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FAVOURITE THINGS

I decided to pull a post, Diary of a Young Girl, because when I began to read latter portions of the book, I found passages that were anti-Semitic. I could have left the link as a historical artifact, but I do not feel comfortable in promoting even historical hatred. I will find a substitute in the following weeks.

NOTE: DATED JULY 2, 2008: The book was written by a Viennese psychologist, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth not by a teenager.



A French Wiki entry definitely states that the book is a fake.

---Anne

USEFUL THINGS

Harvestfield.ca is one of my favourite sites for clip art.

I must admit that I am addicted to this site. It is very useful for black and white clip art. I use some of the graphics on this blog and highly recommend it for design use.

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BEST THINGS

Freelance Writing.com is a great site for many links to a variety of freelance work opportunities. Sign up for their Tuesday Morning Coffee which is a digest of current jobs.

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KNOWING YOUR LIMITS

Wise Moves In The Profession

Recently, I turned down a gig to translate a lifestyle entrepreneur's fifteen page manuscript from English into French. I am not having much of a go with the translation business. Sigh... It was one of those dubious health and wealth peddlers whom I do not trust to have my best interests at heart. Especially after I did a little research and the person's website was down. Yeah.

Part of writing is giving oneself a good pace. It is also important to reflect on what creates moral value and what does not. Is it more important to push a dubious product or to create something poetic? In the long view, poetry or a finely crafted novel is of more ethical value than a get-rich-immediate scheme.

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IN MEMORIAM

Tillie Olson

(January 14,1912–

January 1, 2007)

I read Tillie Olson in college but her message of how hard it is to be a writer and a parent did not resonate until I had a family of my own. It is difficult whether you are a father or a mother to get to the keyboard or the pad of paper when the laundry is piling up, the bathtub leaks down into the second floor,or the youngest has the tummy bug and has spewed once again all over the last bedsheets.Writing is not a leisure sport for parents. Instead, it is a sprint between disasters and bills (which are the same evils). It is the lonely feeling that you get late at night when the wind howls outside and the words refuse to make their stubborn appearance. You wonder at these times whether or not you should have got the MBA instead of an English degree in medieval to Victorian literature and you have doubt about one's self-worth that haunts inside like a lurking windigo. There are no easy answers to the question of being a writer. Why?

It is a sometimes an unreasonable job that, like a forest demon, can be either a blessing or curse to those possessed with ink in their blood.

Tillie Olson articulated this solitude that a writer has when there seems to be only the black box of one's mind among the day to day of housecleaning, penny budgeting, and stretching the self outside of the safe realm of one's imagination to nurture the children that surround you. She will be greatly missed as an author.

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AN INTERESTING QUESTION

If I Knew The Answer


Someone recently asked me how one gets started as a writer. Fools rush in where Seraphim fear to tread. I know this from my experience as a not yet published author who got her first rejection letter not long ago. Writing seems to be the easy part but getting published is the greater hurdle. I sent in a plot synopsis but didn't fit in with the publisher's list.

I have since been more successful in the commercial markets as an editor. I have updated my initial advice.

I think what is most important to me as a writer is to find something from your own experience. Don't go chasing the latest literary fad. No more chick lit, please. Fads in publication come and go or get stale to publishers very quickly. Boy wizards are out.

Write from your heart. When I write, the words are a culmination of life experiences.

Research the publisher's catalog of books before you inquire on a manuscript. It makes no sense to send a non-fiction tome on the molecular structure of carbon to a literary publisher.

Read books like eating potato chips. Read about everything from nineteenth century violins, for example, to herbs of the Middle Ages and every topic beyond. Make notes if the reading sparks an idea. See the advice below.

Always carry a notebook and several pens to jot down your thoughts. I feel dishabille without at least two pens, the other for emergency ink shortage, and the same quantity of notebooks with the addition of a day planner. Ideas strike with a rain shower's immediacy and fade to dust as soon.Capture these ephemeral tangents while you may.

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