Total Chaos

So how does a writer with assignments on her desk get them completed in a timely fashion?
She decides to completely purge her home this week and cross her fingers for decent yard sale weather this weekend.
What?
Yes, you read that right. Christmas is looming and I'm getting more and more nervous as my 6-year-old daughter carries her clipboard around the house while she composes gift checklists for both her and her 3-year-old brother.
Meanwhile every closet in the house is bursting at the seams and I trip over a toy every five minutes. I'm one of those people who gets a little claustrophobic in the wintertime and can't focus on my work knowing chaos looms right around the corner. I'm trying to preempt the wintertime madness by getting organized before the cold weather sets in this year.
Did I mention we have way too much stuff? We're talking shoeboxes and shoeboxes stuffed full of receipts from up to 10 years back. Textbooks from college that I will never pick up again. In my laundry room today I found a stack of dirty (yes, baby food and all) baby bibs. My son will be four in February. You do the math.
So I'm trying to chip away at this a little at a time, hauling items for the yard sale out to the garage, which we cleaned up this weekend. I've already been to Goodwill twice for the stuff I've never been able to get rid of at previous yard sales. Even the kiddos are being cooperative. I told them Santa may not stop by the house if it looks like we don't need any more toys. Terrible, I know, but it worked!
So wish me luck. In between piles of old clothes and magazines I'll be composing away on my computer so I can hopefully still meet my deadlines while working my way toward a clean, clutter-free home.
Is it really possible? I hope so!

Friday!

You know what I love about my job? I love that it revolves around my life, and not the other way around. For example, this morning I got to drop both my kids off at school and spend 30 minutes volunteering in my daughter's classroom. I'm now in the public library with my laptop, where I can check e-mail, blog, and browse through any mainstream magazines that could be prospective markets. Then I get to pick my son up from preschool and take him to lunch and speech therapy.
Working a traditional day job never allowed me to do this.
Sure, there are drawbacks. I worked a lot of evenings this week, but unfortunately I know a lot of my peers with full-time day jobs who also have to do the same, without getting paid for it. There's also the lack of a steady paycheck. It's been a nerve-wracking past few weeks waiting for checks to come in, but I finally felt a little relief from that this week. And because I have small children, I have to squeeze in work where I can to make up for days when they are sick or not in school (my son has had a day off from his preschool once a week for election day, Veteran's Day, etc. the past month) which has thrown a small wrench in my productivity!
But I feel that I've accomplished a lot this week. I finished an article two weeks before deadline. I polished up my non-fiction book proposal, sent it to an agent and got an encouraging rejection within four hours. I've researched other agents. I've sent out a call for experts for another article due at the beginning of December. I submitted an essay to a parenting magazine. I cleaned out my e-mail inbox. It's been a good week! How has yours been?

Did You Hear the One About . . .?

I'm sorry I've been out of commission the past week. I've had that pesky chest cold that it seems everyone has this year -- the one where you cough for at least a month. I finally organized my e-mail last night and will finish that correspondence this evening, hopefully. I'm pretty sure I lost one of my long-standing clients yesterday, due to the state of the economy and restructuring within the company, but I was expecting it and luckily picked up a new publication with the exact same pay scale a few months ago. The ebb and flow of freelancing!
I really enjoyed this post about how to head off freelance disasters yesterday. Yes, I have experienced all of these and more:

• I've had sources hound me to be experts in articles and then, during the interview, pretty much say my article topic isn't really relevant to their expertise.
  
• I've interviewed sources who then wanted to change all their quotes to medical mumbo jumbo when I provided quotes to them for fact-checking before turning in an article.
  
• I had a PR rep recently contact me so her client could be an expert for an article. Then she proceeded to reschedule the time and day of the interview no less than seven times over the next week. Luckily, I had learned from my previous freelance disasters and found a few other sources to cover myself off. I finally had to tell the rep that obviously her client had a very busy schedule, and I would just proceed with the sources I had already interviewed. This resulted in one last, frantic e-mail and phone call on her part, but I had moved on by then.

Do you have any crazy freelance-writing disasters to share? How did you deal with them?

Boost Your Sales With Business Writing

In your quest for freelance success, don't overlook the importance of business writing, or commercial writing, as some call it, as an income booster. I know, it doesn't sound very glamorous, but there is a need out there and you may be just the writer to fill it. A good place to start is local businesses looking for someone to put together a media kit for them or a preschool who would love some updated brochure copy. Make a list of all the advertising and public relations agencies in your area and put together a few samples and a copy of your resume and business card. These places typically need contractors when they pick up a few new accounts and they have more work than they can cover off with their full-time staff. I worked in public relations before making the switch to freelance writing, and I still do business-writing projects (even if it just requires fact checking/proofreading) from time to time. Browse an updated copy of The Writer's Market for a handy chart on what you should charge for specific services.

Rejections Can Be Good

I've decided to consider any rejection from an editor to be a good sign. Many, many editors do not have the time or inclination to respond to every query they aren't interested in pursuing. I've heard from other writers that one should take a personalized rejection from an editor as an encouraging sign to keep the queries coming. Some "positive" rejections I've received in the past include:

"I enjoyed reading your essay. However, I must report that we’ve decided to give it a pass. Please note that this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your work (we receive about 750 submissions for every seven we publish). I wish you the best of luck placing this piece elsewhere."

"We actually have covered this within the past year or two--a bit too soon to revisit it, but thanks for your interest."

"Thanks for your interest in ----- Magazine. Currently we're working
almost exclusively with people who work in the ---- field and are
willing to write free of charge. I wish I had a different answer for
you, but that's what we're doing at this point."

"Hi, and thanks for the look. Sorry, but we'll have to pass. Most all freelance we buy is set in the non-Florida Southeast; we rely on staff, wire service and travel columnists for coverage of destinations farther afield."

Nowhere in any of these rejections did I pick up on any kind of "bug off, your work stinks" kind of tone. Some feedback is better than no feedback, right? At least when you receive a personalized rejection, you know to cross that publication off your list and move on to the next editor.

What sort of "positive" rejections have you received? What did you learn from them? Check out this article to learn what kinds of pitches won't get rejected.

Need a New Blog Design?

Hilary at Simply Yours Designs is giving away one free custom blog package, which is worth $90. The giveaway ends on Oct. 26, 2009. Head on over to her blog and read all about it, and don't forget to visit her shop to learn more about her gorgeous design packages. I'm salivating, really. Blogger, I love your free and convenient program, but my blog needs a little help. It does not reflect my personality at all, but I am very design-challenged. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who feels this way! Where do people get all these cute, whimsical, modern designs I keep running across?

Has This Ever Happened to You?

In March 2008, I came across an interesting newspaper article on the AP wire about volunteers in "The Doe Network," a network of amateur sleuths who help i.d. unidentified unnamed bodies in the United States. There are volunteers in almost every state, and they help track down friends and family of the more than 40,000 unidentified in the United States.
I clipped out the article and put it in a file marked "Research for novel," and didn't pick it up again. But I'm obsessed with crime shows like Cold Case, so I was interested to see the previews of a new ABC show "The Forgotten" advertised recently. I've been watching it, and so far I'm enjoying Christian Slater in the lead role and watching how the volunteers work the cases in their spare time. Instead of "The Doe Network," they go by the name of "The Forgotten Network."
Have you ever had a similar idea that you then saw showcased in a television pilot, novel or screenplay? Please share! It's always bound to happen, as there are pretty much no original ideas anymore. It actually made me feel good that I picked up on something that had entertainment merit with television producers, even if I didn't do anything with it at the time.