March 2012

Craigslist Ads

Why No Response?

Craigslist is one of the primary places to find work online as an affordable writer, and I have found work that way before. But there's one thing I don't really understand about a lot of the jobs listed on Craigslist. Even if you check it religiously every single day and respond to every single ad that looks promising, it can still take you several months to find any work.

Is Your Writing Income Diverse Enough?

One of the things that concerns me about my current writing situation is that more than half of my income is from a single source.  That can be a major issue if that particular source should change its policies or no longer need my writing services, because I would be left with a substantial hole in my budget.  In writing, or any other business, diversity is the key to staying afloat when things change.

Great Yet Affordable Writers: Clark Ashton Smith

aka "Klarkash-Ton"

He's not as widely read or remembered these days as Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft, the other two greats of “Weird Tales” magazine, but he was a pen-pal of both men and his stories are just as interesting as theirs. His name was Clark Ashton Smith, and what he really wanted to be was a poet. In fact, he enjoyed a pretty solid reputation as a poet in his own lifetime, though the fact that his work is openly romanticist and traditional has caused it to be largely ignored now.

Get It While It's Hot

As most writers will tell you, freelance writing is a feast or famine business.  It can be great sometimes, with more work than you can possibly handle, and at other times, the drought can seem to go on forever.  We all have specific reasons for writing, but most of us don’t really want to dedicate more time than is necessary to writing, because then we can’t pursue the interests and passions that are denied us in a regular job.  For that reason,  it can be hard to motivate yourself to write overtime when there’s a lot of work to do, but in order to stay afloat in the lean times, you need to do just that.

Great Yet Affordable Writers: Robert E. Howard

Creator of "Conan"

Robert E. Howard was an affordable writer, but unless you're a fan of old pulp fiction you may not have heard of him. You've probably heard of his most famous creation, though- Conan the Barbarian, the Noble Savage of Noble Savages. Most people associate Conan with a certain former governor of California, or (if they're really young) with that other guy in the recent 3-D Conan movie. But Howard's Conan was really nothing like Arnold. For one thing, he wouldn't have talked with an Austrian accent- Cimmerians were supposed to be proto-Celts, distant ancestors of the Irish.