Little did I know when my marriage broke up–actually, down–that writing would become a lifeline, drawing me out of depression, or that my freelance career was about to take off. My success since then has been due to desperation, determination, and dumb luck.
Rejection. It’s a problem I’ve dealt with my whole life. It usually stems from my need to share voluminous amounts of detail with my audience.
I write comic books. So do writers you may have actually heard of like Stephen King, Kevin Smith, Max Allan Collins, Brad Meltzer and Greg Rucka. Should you? Well, in 2002 over 67 million comic books were ordered through Diamond Distribution, America’s largest comic book distributor, with total sales topping $190 million. Helping those sales […]
Everything I know about good writing I learned in Portage, Wisconsin in 1981. I was a cub reporter for the local daily paper. On the way back to the office from our standard mid-day fare of beer-boiled brats and string cheese, my friend, Patrick, also a cub reporter and the more talented writer, and I paused at a sidewalk book sale. Patrick handed me Giving Good Weight by one John McPhee.
You’ve looked at the magazines and thought, “Heck, I could do this!” Is it really as easy as it seems, or do you still have a lot to learn? I used to look at the magazines my teenage neighbor and her friends read and think, “Heck, I could do that!” So one day, I borrowed […]
For the better part of the past four years, I’ve worked as a hired gun. In other words, I’ve financed my living primarily as a freelance commercial writer.
The average freelancer is probably much more interested in the actual writing he or she does than worrying about the business aspects of a writing career. Consider contracts. Many writers simply accept the language in the contracts they receive because they don’t know any better, they’re afraid to try to negotiate with a publisher, or […]
Certainly you may have my autograph – but no pictures, please! WritersWeekly.com brought me fame and a mailbox bursting with fan mail. Okay, there were eight e-mails, but when you consider that until then I’d only had two fan letters in my 15-year writing life, that was riches indeed. Andy Warhol predicted we would all have our 15 minutes of fame, but mine lasted almost a week.
Excerpted from: Tax Planning Strategies for the Self-Employed Much mysticism surrounds the home office deduction. Many tax accountants continue to advise their clients to avoid the home office deduction. They may say that any depreciation deduction will have to be recaptured if/when they sell their home. This was always a silly argument. As of December […]
The phone rang this morning and I realized for perhaps the first time that I Am A Writer. It was my friend, Jen. We used to work at the same TV station.
