Henry David Thoreau must contribute to this introduction, for his words sum up the heartbeat of my writing. “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”
With a family this large, in addition to four cats, a dog, a lizard and some sea monkeys, our house is never really empty…but it sure is quiet after the crowd we had here on Thanksgiving! The day was perfect and the children were so sad when Grampa and Rita had to fly back to Texas.
With all the hubbub about content mills (and how many believe they are responsible for declining pay rates for freelancers), I can’t help but wonder if they are also contributing to the decline of the quality of writing on the Internet…
Letters will return next week.
Blogging has become standard operational management for local real estate agents. A recent Internet search engine request for “real estate+blogs” turned up more than a million listings. Firms now routinely maintain a blog as part of their website, attempting to attract the attention of people using search engines for information. The more often the blog is updated with fresh material, and the more frequently specific key words and phrases are used, the more readily that website and blog will turn up in results. A blog associated with a business serves as a kind of net to draw in viewers. As a side-effect, it also offers an opportunity for a freelance writer.
I am working on a nonfiction book manuscript. I hired an editor to do line editing for $500.00 and book doctoring (critiquing) for an additional $500.00 – for a total of $1,000.00. I sent some sample paragraphs from my manuscript to the editor, which she edited and returned to me. There weren’t any problems with the sample so I sent a check for $500.00 as a deposit for the job. The editor did do the job and return the edited manuscript back to be on time. The quality of the book doctoring was worth the money. The editing was not. The editor made improvements in areas like sentence construction, and eliminating unnecessary words to make the manuscript flow better. However, there were so many typos and issues with grammar in the edited copy that now I feel compelled to hire a professional proofreader to catch any mistakes I didn’t catch myself. Hiring a reputable proofreader to fix the editor’s mistakes is going to cost me hundreds of dollars. I haven’t sent the remaining $500.00 to the editor yet. Frankly I am having a hard time bringing myself to write that check. My feeling is that the edited copy should have fewer flaws than my original, unedited copy. I don’t know what to do. I can’t insist the editor go back and proofread it herself because I don’t trust the quality of her work. I have thought of emailing the editor and asking for a discount on the remainder of my bill to compensate me for the cost of hiring a proofreader. What would you do in my position?
Several years ago, I created and analyzed four years of submission spreadsheets – time of year, average length, genres, and markets – in order to improve my fledgling part-time freelance career. Then, I looked at how I spent my non-writing time, and made a startling discovery: The years I read more, I wrote more. The more I wrote, the more I submitted and the more I published.
