To Those Who Love a Freelancer

I’ll get to you in a minute. First, I’m going to address my brethren.

Dear fellow freelancers, tell me if this sounds familiar: While exploring prospective clients, you realize that someone you are close with knows a person at a company you’d like to connect with. So falling back on the old “it’s who you know” adage (#networking!), you contact your friend or family member and say something along these lines: “Hey, I see you know Person A at Company B. I’d love to offer them my writing services. Would you mind introducing me so I can ask the best way to go about that?”

Sound familiar so far? And now here’s the kicker. Your friend/relative/colleague responds with: “Well, I don’t want to impose” or “I’d be uncomfortable asking for a favor.”

Sigh.

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Dear folks who love a freelancer: Thanks for waiting. Now I’ll get to you.

If you’ve uttered words such as cited above, you need to reframe your perspective. When your freelancer friend or family member — and we’re talking about people who are experienced, published writers — asks you to make an introduction, don’t look at it as asking for a favor. Look at it as presenting an opportunity.

Companies are increasingly using content marketing to educate and retain customers. That means smart companies want strong writers. When we freelance writers introduce ourselves to a prospective client, either via a letter of introduction (LOI) or a personal contact (that’s you), we are not begging for work. We are offering our services — services that have the strong potential to improve business-client/customer relationships.

So the next time your freelancing loved one asks, “Hey, can you introduce me to your friend at Company B*?” remember: You aren’t “asking for a favor.” You are fostering an introduction that will hopefully lead to a mutually beneficial business relationship.

Isn’t that a better way to look at it?

* If “Company B” makes you hear “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in your head, a virtual handshake and tip of the hat to you.



Countdown to 40

March 29, 2019: My 39th birthday. This means I have entered my 40th year of life. That’s what a birthday is. A completion of a year. It’s the last year before a big milestone (supposedly).

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to set fire to all the mental and physical lists of things we “should” have “achieved” by the time we’re X years old. Those things are designed to breed feelings of inadequecy. See, all of those artificial timelines and “30 things you should have by the time you’re 30,” and “40 under 40” lists … those are terrible, terrible things.

So why am I making a 40 things list? And why am I writing about it on my business website?

Well, first, this list is strictly for me. You’re welcome to borrow anything you want off it, but this isn’t me telling you “this is what you ought to do,” it’s “this is how I’d like to spend the last year of my 30s.”

Second, as a freelance business owner, you have to think a lot about mindset. In the first episode of her new podcast, Deliberate Freelancer, Melanie Padgett Powers discusses the mindset of acknowledging oneself as a business owner.

I’ve been freelancing since 2013 — we’ll talk about the origins of that at another time — but I never thought of myself as a business owner. In June of 2018, six months pregnant with my daughter, I launched Red Pen Editorial Services. Did the clients come pouring in? No. But now instead of just going from gig to gig, I am building something. Slowly, stumblingly, sometimes painfully. And you can’t deny that the better your personal mindset, the better your business one.

This idea was inspired, in part, by listening to an interview with author James Clear on the High Income Business Writing podcast, hosted by Ed Gandia. If you’re a freelancer, or freelance business owner, or a person who wants be “good at life,” these are names you should know. Clear’s theory of atomic habits talks about creating better life/work systems by improving just a little each day. I might be getting that wrong.

Ten years ago, on my 29th birthday, a friend asked me what I’d learned in the past year. Three hundred and sixty-five days from now, I’d like to have a good answer to that question. This list is about a lot of small steps. Some things are to be built over time, others will be done all at once. Some are personal. There are others that are too personal to put online. Some are business. I hope most will inform both. My ultimate goal, the one thing I truly want to learn: How to be someone my daughter can be proud of.

Anyway, here we go … 40 Things to Learn, Books to Read, Plans to Set, Habits to Make or Break, and A Bunch of Other Crap to Do and/or Work Toward By the Time I Turn 40 — A 365 Day Countdown:

1) Actually read “Atomic Habits,” by James Clear
2) Get in bed before midnight on weekdays
3) Be able to get out of bed without pain
4) Read for pleasure every day
5) Get my daughter’s baby journal up to date
6) Reread “Little Women”
7) Pay my bills on the same day every month
8) Learn to bake macarons
9) Wait 30 minutes in the morning before looking at the internet
10) Sell something I knitted (knit? What’s the past tense of knit?)
11) Drink more water
12) Ask for better rates without feeling guilty
13) Actually declutter. Like, the full Kondo.
14) Find some clothes that “spark joy” — even on my post-baby body
15) Plan and prepare meals ahead of time
16) Get away from the computer/phone an hour before I go to sleep
17) Reduce my use of verbal fillers
18) Finish reading “Writing Without Bullshit” by Josh Bernoff
19) Learn how to not only write without, but live without bullshit. Okay, less. Less bullshit. Reduce bullshit. Minimize bullshit.
20) Try mindfulness. Again. For 30 days. For 3 minutes a day for 30 days. Then if I still feel like it’s not the thing for me, be good with saying so.
21) Grasp some concept of what SEO means, beyond the actual defintion
22) Post at least one blog a month. Hopefully more, but small steps
23) Find an anchor client that PAYS WELL
24) Bake my daughter a birthday cake from scratch
25) Get comfortable (ish) driving alone with my baby
26) Learn how to be comfortable saying some version of “if you forgive me for not answering that, I’ll forgive you for asking it.”
27) Pitch five stories to national magazines (pitching SUCKS — topic for another day)
28) Read “Dreyer’s English” by Benjamin Dreyer
29) Get (and use) a Met Opera On Demand subscription (I miss New York! If you’re there and you’ve never been, go to the opera)
30) Learn how to plant and grow something
31) Attend a conference for work (I’m thinking ACES: The Society for Editing)
32) Start therapy again
33) Compile a honeymoon photo album (we went in 2017 — oops)
34) Ask for (and earn) at least $100/hour
35) Volunteer
36) Stop allowing people (and myself) to make me “feel inferior without my consent” - Eleanor Roosevelt
37) Learn the basics of using a sewing machine
38) Be sought out by clients
39) Plan a family vacation
40) Reread Jane Austen

Hitting the Accent

This is an interesting article from the June 23, 2018 Sunday New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/insider/mexico-world-cup-spanish-accent-marks.html

Paulina Chavira, an editor at The New York Times en Español in the Mexico City bureau, lobbied to have proper accents added to the jerseys of the Mexican National soccer (fútbol) team. The lack of accent, the article clarifies, is akin to a spelling error. 

"A simple accent may seem trivial for a lot of people, but its presence or its absence changes the way we pronounce a word, and sometimes even its meaning," Chavira is quoted as saying. 

Indeed, if we are as dedicated as we say we are to representing people as they wish to be represented - such as using a person's pronoun of choice - shouldn't it be just as important to be certain we're spelling that person's name correctly? It's a small change, but it can make a big difference to someone. 

 

 

 

Women Who Break Things

Okay, not "things," like dishes. Codes. Women who break codes. 

I had the pleasure of writing about "code girls" for Goucher College. In the 1940's, young women from a number of schools, including Goucher, were recruited as code breakers to decipher complex messages from the German Enigma machines. Their work, often overlooked, contributed directly to the Allied victory in Europe in World War II. 

If you watched The Bletchley Circle on PBS, it's a little like that but with less murder (hopefully) and fewer English accents. 

See the full story below or link here: Goucher's Secret 'Code Girls' Helped End World War II

Note: This story is not bylined. 

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Discovering Unknown Women Writers

One of the best ways to become a better writer is to read more. While the deluge of social media certainly spoonfeeds (and sometimes force feeds) us plenty of options for reading, sometimes we need to seek things out, rather than just reading what's readily available.

I was intrigued by this obituary in the June 22 New York Times, about Nina Baym, a professor who dedicated her career to the discovery of unknown women writers. In college, I chose a major in women's studies because I was interested in looking at history, literature, culture, etc. through a lens that was different from what I'd always studied previously. (And because I was flunking statistics, which pretty much screwed my psych major. #brutalhonesty). 

From the obituary, by writer Neil Genzingler, a quote from Professor Baym:

“Today we hear of this literature, if at all, chiefly through detractors who deplore the feminizing — and hence degradation — of the noble art of letters. A segment of literary history is thus lost to us, a segment that may be of special interest today as we seek to recover and understand the experiences of women.
I have not unearthed a forgotten Jane Austen or George Eliot, or hit upon even one novel that I would propose to set alongside ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ Yet I cannot avoid the belief that ‘purely’ literary criteria, as they have been employed to identify the best American works, have inevitably had a bias in favor of things male — in favor, say, of whaling ships rather than the sewing circle as a symbol of the human community; in favor of satires on domineering mothers, shrewish wives, or betraying mistresses rather than tyrannical fathers, abusive husbands, or philandering suitors.”

Please read Professor Baym's obituary in full here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/obituaries/nina-baym-who-brought-novels-by-women-to-light-dies-at-82.html
 

Discussion questions: 
1) Tell us about a little-known female writer (or writer of color, LGBT writer, etc) you admire and why. How did you come to know of this person's work?
2) What do you think the value is in uncovering the work of writers who are not considered to be part of the literary canon, or otherwise well-known?
3) Why was Professor Baym's quest to discover the work of unknown female authors important? Or, conversely, why was it unimportant? 

Young Artist and Entrepreneur Cuts Her Own Path

This is my latest for the Kogod School of Business at American University: A profile of alumna Lillian Cutts, a young musician, graphic designer and virtual reality enthusiast who is using the marketing and entrepreneurial skills she learned in school to create her customized career. 

Cutting Her Own Path

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