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I am blessed to have a few clients I’ve now worked with for years. It’s wonderful to understand the writing style, the expectations, the turnaround time, and the little touches that will take a piece from fine to “WOW.” I love those little joys, the spark-moments when as a writer I can give my very best.

When you are new, though, it can be hard to find that groove! I’ve begun working with a few new clients lately and I have to admit, there are so many ways to do great writing. I can intuitively do some kinds of writing well, but I’ll be the first to admit that some kinds of writing take me a long time to master. I want to be successful, but sometimes that just means hours of revision and reworking to get to the place the client wants me.

The great thing is that, no matter how painstaking the process, I usually get faster, better, and more confident as I go. However, right now, I’m in the thick of the newness, and I want to encourage any of you writers out there: embrace that newness! It may give you jitters but it is impressive to be putting yourself out there. I feel empowered by my new clients who are giving me a chance to become a more diverse and versatile writer over time.

Writing, like so many other creative fields, does suffer from an overabundance of interested parties. For this reason, I’m frequently interacting with people who want “help” with writing or editing, but are then taken aback when asked what they will pay for it.

I don’t want to create conflict in any way, but the word help has a couple of different connotations: helping as in volunteerism, and helping as in willingness to be a part of a team. What are your best strategies for making it clear, from the beginning, that payment is expected for your work?

Two months into full-time freelance writing with Onword Content, and let me tell you: it’s a lot of applications!

I don’t mean job applications; I mean crisp, multi-paragraph pitches to everything from content strategy teams to publications. These pitches are where I get to craft every detail to reach the people I want to work for.

The first few months of any business, I believe, are awash with this sort of work: building a client base, after all, is all about getting your name and your expertise out there!

I’m really enjoying the fun of opening my inbox every day; certainly, the people I pitch are just as busy as anyone else, so I may only get one response for every 10 outreach emails, but when I do… you better believe I brew a new pot of coffee to celebrate.

Where are you in your business life cycle these days? Wherever you are, I hope you are finding the moments of joy, like getting a response to a pitch, like I am.

Hello! Recently, I’ve published a few items; I thought I’d share them with you all!

A long essay on dinner parties and how I’ve learned to throw them: https://thesmartset.com/reviving-the-dinner-party/

All the places to go horseback riding in Butler County: https://www.gettothebc.com/blog/post/horseback-riding-butler-county

All the self-help audiobooks I recommend for the New Year: https://bookriot.com/2018/12/06/self-help-audiobooks-for-resolutions/

Looking forward to many, many more assignments in the New Year!

(From my old blog, Messy Mapmaker, which is currently unavailable online, alas!)

It is now officially that time again: grading season. My first batch of student essays is in and the drafts are staring at me, daring me to read them, add comments, and fill out the rubrics. It isn’t hard work, not really, but it does require every ounce of my concentration, and it isn’t perfectly objective, so I feel like if I’m distracted in any way, it might hinder my judgment.

So I end up delaying grading… like many teachers… for longer than is ideal. It isn’t even ideal for me: the feeling of dreading grading is way worse than actually getting some grading done.

Because this is the case, my Monday Motivation plan today is to layer my work. I’ve decided that for every essay I grade in its entirety, I can work on some organization and writing work that I like much more. I am not allowed to lose myself in the fun work; I get 20 minutes of it, max. Then back for another essay.

This way, I do technically grade about twice as slowly as I usually do, but (and this is important) I make SOME progress on grading. After all, the physical act of grading an essay is not enough to leave me sweating and dizzy – it is doable. But I procrastinate, which isn’t good for anyone. I make progress, and I get rewarded, so I look forward to more progress.

This Monday hasn’t been very easy so far, and I’ve got a major meeting that I’m not much looking forward to, but knowing that I’ll get time for the work I like best in between the bouts of work I like least gets me pumped to work hard. I also am giving myself little incentives, like moving out of my office and sitting in a nice common space that I enjoy, and making myself a yummy cup of coffee as a break, to get through it all.

Hope you are all getting things done this Monday, no matter how many unpleasant tasks are ahead of you!

I’ve been trying like crazy to avoid caffeine lately, since drinking it makes me jittery, but one of its other great effects is productivity. For a long time, a cup of coffee was the way I jolted myself up to speed after lunch. Getting work done after lunch is now slow going, and I have to struggle to do as much in two hours as I can do with one good hour in the morning.

That being said, I’ve given myself a few new tips for getting through that time of day:

Schedule Physically Active Work: I have been trying to put meetings on my schedule for afternoons, especially meetings where I have to get out of my office and go to a different building. This means a brisk (cold!) walk and a conversation, which I usually find so engaging that I won’t be tired. I also do things like hanging up posters, cleaning my office, getting and returning library books, and going out to purchase supplies during afternoons. This physically active work makes me more prepared to do mentally active work when I get back to my desk.

Get up, get water, drink it, get back to work: While water has zero caffeine in it, the activity of walking across the building to fill up a cup with water, drinking it, and getting back to work tends to revive me at least temporarily. I like it also because I am not all that good at staying hydrated, so this simple routine means that no matter how drowsy I get, I always have a little excursion option.

Use the last 15 minutes of the Day to Make Plans for the Next Day: For some reason, even my snooziest afternoon can get exciting when I get to make plans (who me? your resident productivity-and-organization blogger?). Coming up with a list of how to best utilize my morning the next day is a good way to invest in the fact that having a waiting list the next morning will make me very effective.

How do you get through the post-lunch drowsiness? I know it’d be great if all 8 hours of my workday were as productive as 9am-10am, but since they aren’t, I’m still looking for new tips!

Neil Gaiman is coming to speak in my city in the upcoming months. For those of you who don’t know him, he writes very fantastical and interesting stories (Sandman, Stardust, Coraline) and has said a lot about living the creative life. I use one of his metaphors all the time: in his early career, he says he chose to pursue a project if it brought him “closer to the mountain,” with the mountain being the chance to write stories for a living. So, early on, it made sense to take any kind of writing job because it brought him closer to the mountain, but once he’d become more well-known, he needed to be choosier, because some projects were actually not creative and often not even lucrative, so why walk away from the mountain just to take all projects?

He also mentions that sometimes the problems of success are even harder than the problems of failure. I don’t know that I agree (failure is brutal, despite the fact that I want to be the kind of person who is resilient against failure), though he points out that at some point in his career he was answering so much email that he wasn’t getting to do the projects he loves. I can definitely sympathize with such a problem, despite not being a famous author.

2018 finds me at a crossroads: I’m not a famous journalist or a fancy blogger. What I am, however, is a freelance writer who still has a 45-hour-a-week day job, at a time when I’m finally getting more writing work than I can possibly do. I’m having to make the choices of success, the ones where I turn some things down despite the fact that technically, if I did no fun things and never spoke to my husband and lived only to write, I could do them all.

The mountain, for me, isn’t writing stories for a living. It’s more holistic than that: it’s having work in writing that brings me joy and doesn’t overload me with deadline stress. It’s making enough money to feel free and to feel like I’m saving some, but not enough to be a big shot. I have to keep these things in mind even as I am trying to dig a little deeper and find more inspiration to see where this “writing thing” might take me. It is, as always, a balance to figure out.

Nanowrimo is one of those challenges just crazy enough to lure a lot of people into it. If you haven’t heard, National Novel Writing Month (abbreviated with the first few letters of each word) is the challenge to write a short novel in November, a 30-day month for 50,000 words or more. The month draws droves of people back to their dusty dreams of being a writer, being a novelist, and let’s them really live it.

I LOVE IT.

I’ve only successfully written the 50,000 words on two… maybe 3? occasions. Lately, I try to pick ideas that feel fun to me, not like marketable novels, not like journalistic writing.

This year, I am in the thick of it! I like the accomplishment of setting an arbitrary and unrewarded goal and hitting it. It makes me think that I can do a lot more than I do on an average day if I set my mind to it.

One thing I’m all too aware of is that most of the novels written during Nanowrimo are not ever published; they often aren’t very good at all. At the same time, the people who wrote them are a little better somehow: they figured out a good synonym for a word, or they practiced what they’ve been saying for years about how they “love to write,” or they are a little more confident in themselves. I really think it is a challenge that changes people for the better, even if the prose it generates isn’t all that great.

Is there a major challenge you set up for yourself, only to make sure that you are continually pushing yourself? It’s a bit like bravery practice, actually, but perhaps a little different. Feel free to share in the comments.

I have wanted, for quite a long time, to be better as a hostess. I don’t mean a more prim apron, a better hors d’oeuvres spread, or a nice coat rack. I want to be calmer, more confident, and less likely to pull my hair out in the last few moments before people come into my home.

I see my home as a bit of a sanctuary – while I do my best to make it a comfortable place for Husband, I enjoy the fact that there are too many clothes on the floors and I wear leggings with baggy t-shirts as my main uniform while padding around barefoot. I choose to host parties and movie nights mostly because I want to see my friends, but if I had my way, we’d always do those things in other peoples’ homes. I just feel the civic need to contribute to the fun that the whole friend group has.

So this year, as part of my quick-at-recovering goal and my bravery goal, I want to make this whole process less arduous. Husband ends up a little bewildered when I’m shrill and stressed right before everyone arrives and I have to pivot to being happy and fun. It’s tough on him, since he wants to help me be happy but he really doesn’t get stressed about people coming over.

I think at the core of my nerves is the idea of someone finding me disgusting or childish, like if they saw that I had left dishes on the dining room table from last week or a sweatshirt just lying on the floor in the foyer they wouldn’t want to be friends with me any more. Realistically, there’s no reason why they’d feel differently about me for these things, but something about me needs the house to be pretty perfect, a blank canvas on which the party can be super-imposed. In reality, all homes have touches of quirks that help the guests have cool things to talk about, but when it’s my house, it stresses me out for some reason.

We’ve had two sets of folks over so far this year, one set for dinner and one for a game night, and I’m happy to report I held it together way better. I just thought about what the worst case scenario was, which was that they didn’t really like it and they chose to go home quickly. In both cases, everyone stayed for hours and hours, much longer than an obligation would have anyone stay, and I think they liked it. I do the same thing at my friends’ homes when I’m having a good time, and I’m trying to relax and realize that I can make a fun evening for my friends too.

For about a year, I blogged about living my (disorganized) life on a site called Messy Mapmaker.

Due to my serious mismanagement of my hosting and web editing accounts, I can’t currently access that site, and it redirects here. 

If you came here from one of my articles around the web, welcome! I apologize for not having a long scrolling list of other articles, but rest assured that I am working to get them back!

In the meantime, enjoy some of the vintage Messy Mapmaker content I’ve been able to recover in the next few weeks.