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The Wednesday Web Browser: Freelance Edition

by Erika Dreifus on
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Elaine Appleton Grant shares “Five Foolproof Ways to Generate Story Ideas Editors Will Love.”
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Know what happened Monday? United States postal rates went up (again). If this is news to you, click here for the nitty-gritty. And don’t expect the SASEs you sent out early this week to make their way back to you (unless you used “Forever” stamps).
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I’m one of the readers Lisa Belkin doesn’t quite understand: I don’t have children of my own, and yet I follow her “Motherlode” blog with great interest. And because I do that, I was amused by this interview, which a sixth-grade journalist conducted concerning Ms. Belkin’s writing career.

The Wednesday Web Browser: "Our" Professor Matteson, Essay on John Balaban, and Suspicious Signs for Freelancers

by Erika Dreifus on
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The new issue of Harvard magazine includes this excellent profile of John Matteson and his book, Eden’s Outcasts, a double biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott. (Before he became an English professor and Pulitzer prize-winning author, Matteson was a lawyer, and he is a Harvard Law School graduate. (Please do not confuse him with the Professor John Matteson involved in this story.)
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John Griswold (alias “Oronte Churm”) has published a moving essay about a mentor, writer John Balaban, in War, Literature & the Arts.
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And in the realm of freelancing, Michelle Rafter offers signs that a magazine is in trouble.

Two Twists on New Year’s Resolutions for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
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Not all writing-related resolutions must involve waking up an hour earlier to draft a few hundred words, or sending out a certain number of submissions each month. Just consider these two approaches:

The Book Publicity Blog has posted a set of (mainly) publicity-related resolutions you might want to adopt, especially if you have a new/forthcoming book. For example: “Set up a Google Alert for your book (or all your books if you’re a book publicist).” And “Make sure an author’s web presence is established early, as in, by the time galleys are sent to the media (typically four-six months before a book goes on sale).”

And since there’s a considerable amount of business e-mail in most practicing writers’ lives–requesting guidelines, pitching article ideas, submitting stories or essays or poems, corresponding about assignments, dealing with invoices and payment, etc.–we can surely benefit from a refresher course on how to handle e-mail communications via “10 Business E-Mail Etiquette New Year’s Resolutions.” Truly excellent material there.

The Wednesday Web Browser: John Updike, Freelance "Follies," and Stories by William D. Kaufman

by Erika Dreifus on
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One of my online discussion groups pointed me to this piece by John Updike in AARP: The Magazine: “The Writer in Winter.”
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Ed Champion shares a tale that may be all too sadly familiar to freelancers.
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And if you haven’t visited my other blog lately, you may want to take a look at my take on The Day My Mother Changed Her Name (stories by William D. Kaufman).