When Dumb Lawyers Take on Crooked Clients By Angela Hoy

When Dumb Lawyers Take on Crooked Clients By Angela Hoy

We recently ran a warning under WritersWeekly Whispers and Warning about an individual who owed a writer money. It wasn’t a huge sum, but enough to feed a small family for a month or so. Shortly after the warning ran, I started receiving a string of emails from this individual (I’ll call him Deadbeat Dan). The emails were poorly written, almost illegible because of the spelling errors. I couldn’t believe this person supposedly published a line of magazines. One funny thing about his emails is that he inserted a copyright statement under his letters. That made us laugh out loud. I guess he’d never heard of paraphrasing and I guess he figured we’d never be able to share his words with our readers if he copyrighted his “work.”

Travelling and Creating By Victor Paul Borg

Travelling and Creating By Victor Paul Borg

Three years ago, in London, I was feeling stuck. I had just finished a guidebook, and increasingly wanted to write about travel, but how could I write about travel if I couldn’t afford to travel? I wasn’t making enough money (from writing and temping) to keep my house, travel on research trips, return to base and write stories; I needed all my income just to survive. I became despondent; I stopped going out and started living the life of a frugal recluse. Over six months, I managed to save a few grand, and that gave me enough money to extricate myself from London. But where would I go? A friend was planning a trip to India, so I decided to join her. We got a flight ticket, London to India to Thailand to Australia. I bought a laptop; with the money left-over I calculated I could spend six months in Asia, and then, when I got to Australia, wouldn’t I be able to find some kind of menial employment?

Novelist’s Life Becomes Reality By Karin Gillespie

The life of a full-time writer seems so sublime. Who wouldn’t want to work in silk pajamas or jet off to New York for a power lunch with an editor? The notion was extremely tempting to me, a single mother struggling to support my family with a job I hated. But publish a novel? I probably had a better chance of becoming a supermodel. Still I dared to record my far-fetched fantasy in my journal, thinking that if I saw it on the page in black and white, it might be obtainable.