Fab Freelance Writing Blog

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(Cross-posted from my writing blog.)

Are you writing as much as you could be? If you’re:

• Anxious when you sit down to write;

• Easily interrupted by outside distractions;

• Baffled by your inability to organize your writing;

• Frustrated: you put off writing until the last moment before a deadline, then are stressed when you rush your writing –

You’ll love my new ebook, “Top 70 Writing Tips To Help You To Write More”.

What if you could WRITE MORE – effortlessly?

It’s possible to write more – to write at least a thousand words an hour, easily and effortlessly.

It’s possible to enjoy writing, and to look forward to writing as the best part of your day.

It’s possible to plan your writing career, or if you’re a hobbyist, to get real joy out of your hobby.

Discover how you can write more every day, and get more joy out of writing.

Technorati Tags: writing, writing more, procrastination, productivity, how to write more

I’m writing my commissioned print Christmas articles right now, so if you haven’t already nailed a batch of December magazine gigs, it might be too late to get holiday season contracts. However, the online Christmas buying season will be in full flood within a month or so.

Get your holiday buying season online gigs now
Web venues will be looking for lots of seasonal material in the months ahead, so start clicking your keyboard.

You need to approach online editors and site owners with your ideas now.

Be original. “Link bait” articles are a sure-sell if you can come up with some linkworthy ideas. (What’s link bait? It’s material that other sites link to, generating buzz and traffic.)

So get hopping, and start preparing for a bunch of Happy Holiday checks heading your way NOW.

Technorati Tags: freelance Christmas, holiday season articles, article proposals linkworthy articles

In today’s copy-and-paste world, it’s all too easy to use someone else’s words. But using someone else’s words and ideas without attribution is stealing. In high-profile cases, when people are caught out, they justify it by saying that they made a mistake, or a clerical error. This is unacceptable, and it’s a career killer.

Plagiarism is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

plagiarize, transitive verb : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source

intransitive verb : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

It’s vital that you have processes in place which ensure that you never use someone else’s words and ideas, or if you do, then you use them only with correct attribution, and for a specific purpose.

Here are the processes I use - create your own, or adapt mine

* I keep my own words and my research separate, not only in different documents, but also in different folders on my hard drive, and in different paper folders;

* When I take manual notes, I keep separate notebooks for research, and for my own observations;

* I don’t copy and paste into my own documents from research notes;

* I summarize research documents, usually with a mind map, and note from whom I got an idea, or whether the idea is my own.

Technorati Tags: plagiarism, freelance writing, writing processes