WritingThoughts

This week’s featured writing blog is Jeanne Dininni’s Writer’s Notes.

One thing I really like about Jeanne’s blog is that she runs it as a community, responding actively to comments. So, if you’re looking for a friendly place to discover more about writing, Jeanne’s blog might be just what you’re looking for.

Last week WritingSpark.com was the featured blog. Read the original WritingSpark.com feature here.

Note: If you’re consistently posting great information and haven’t seen your blog featured in Of Note yet, I apologize. I’ll probably find you soon. I know there are a lot of great blogs out there; I discover more new ones each day. (So many blogs, so little time.)

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

Robert Hruzek over at Middle Zone Musings is running a group writing project. The topic is the world of work. This post is my entry into that project.

Before I worked for myself (which is to say, before I became an independent contractor), I worked as an employee. I held a variety of writing positions for a variety of companies.

In some jobs I produced software manuals. In other positions I produced software manuals and newsletters. In other positions, I created online help files. In nearly all of these positions I was exposed to a corporate culture that caused me to learn and grow. Most of what I learned has carried over, in principle, to my own writing business.

Here’s what I learned from corporate America:

1. First impressions are important.

I remember interviewing for a position. When I got to the building that housed the company I found that the parking lot was under construction. The surface was gravelly and very uneven. Of course I was wearing high heels and hose (the corporate look) so I managed to trip on the way into the building. My fall tore my hose and created a huge cut on my leg. I went to the restroom to try to clean myself up, but didn’t have any bandages handy. Like a trooper, I went ahead with the interview, but noticed that the manager’s gaze was constantly drawn to the bleeding wound on my calf. I don’t think that she heard a word that I said. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. Lesson learned: Wear comfortable shoes and clothes that are professional, yet not fussy.

2. Dealing with Difficult People.

When I first entered the corporate world I’d sometimes encounter a person that it seemed I would never be able to work with. Either, they were loud and rude or they just didn’t seem competent to me. In order to cope with difficult folks, I resorted to prayer. My prayers gave me the patience to try to see issues from the other person’s perspective. The person who had seemed rude, I now saw as assertive. The person who had seemed slow, I now saw as having specialized knowledge in an area different than my own. It didn’t happen immediately, but, in almost every case, I found myself developing a friendship with the person that I had thought I could never work with. Lesson learned: Prayer works. Seeing things from another’s perspective works.

3. Watch Your Tone!

As I begin to use e-mail regularly in the corporate world, I was cautioned time and time again about watching what was said in e-mails. I was doing fine until one day another writer in our group sent out an e-mail to the entire group criticizing an article that had been published by a friend of mine. Most of what the e-mail contained was untrue, and in my indignation for my friend I responded to his e-mail a little too harshly. The next thing I knew, our manager had both of us in a conference room and told us to “work things out.” Lesson learned: Don’t answer e-mails when you are angry. If you must err in your response to something it’s better to be overly gracious than overly defensive.

4. It’s Okay to Depend on Others

As a technical writer, I learned to work closely with members of development teams, testing groups, and trainers (as well as others). I relied on these people to provide access to the applications that I needed to document, to let me know when changes to the applications were made, and to review the accuracy of my work. Lesson learned:  It’s okay to rely on reliable sources when you are writing.

5. Persistence Pays Off!

The corporate world taught me not to quit if you really want to accomplish something. One time I needed to speak with a software developer so that I could finish the writing portion of the project on time. For some reason, the developer didn’t want to meet with me. Both his manager and my manager agreed that he needed to get with me. I e-mailed, I phoned, I used interoffice scheduling to set up meetings with no success.  Finally, a day before the project was due; I parked myself in front of his office. When he arrived I explained why I was there. He said that he was really busy and it would be a long time before he would be able to give me access to the application. I politely replied that I would wait even if it took all day. Guess what? Within an hour, I had the information that I needed. Lesson learned: Don’t give up after a single try.

6. Don’t Burn Bridges!

I am happy to say that, to the best of my knowledge, I would be welcomed back as an employee at every company where I’ve ever worked. It’s important to leave a company as professionally as you entered it. You may think that you are leaving a company for good, but what you don’t realize is that you have left a reputation behind you. One of my best clients comes from a personal referral by a former colleague. I’ve watched many employees decide to “have it out” with the boss once they have decided to leave. Don’t do it. In one instance, a co-worker “had it out” with the boss because he knew that he would be going to work for a competitor company. The very next day a merger between our company and the competitor company was announced. Guess who his new boss was? Lesson learned: Don’t burn bridges! 

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved

Last week I posted on the importance of leaving comments on blog posts.

Over 32 bloggers responded by leaving comments on the post. I was really pleased that so many people “got the message.”

The post was also linked to at least two times and I found three other posts (not necessarily inspired by my post) that included the importance of leave comments in their discussion.

I thought I would share the linking posts with you and the other posts on comments. (There was a third linking site, but the blogger uses some adult terms throughout his site and I don’t want to post anything that my kids can’t read.)

Linking posts:

• Do You Make Readers Run a Comment Obstacle Course?My friend Yvonne totally understood my original post. She addresses the problem of blogging platforms that aren’t comment-friendly.
• It is fun to market online… Another blogging friend, Calvin, saw comments as a fun way to market your blog.

Other recent posts on commenting:

• Top Reasons to Answer to Comments. My friend Mihaela wrote a beautiful tribute to her blog’s community.
• 5 Uncommon Ways to Market Your Blog. Neil Patel, posting as a guest writer on ProBlogger provides this nifty list. Check out list item number 1.
• The Top 10 Blogging Mistakes I Made in My First Year. Another nifty list from veteran blogger Wendy Piersall. Check out list item number 2.

Another really neat result of the original post on blog comments is that I discovered 11 brand new blogs by following commentator’s links. I decided to list my discoveries here:

1. Webstractions
2. Colloquium
3. Arts & Crafts
4. Necessary Skills
5. Versa
6. GardenWall Publications
7. My Flights of Fancy
8. Trying to Catch Up
9. The Century Times
10. Little Woolgatherings
11. Tech Lemming

I hope you enjoy reading my discoveries!

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

A few days ago I published Don’t Cheat Yourself!! (What Should Be Included On Your Invoice?). The post dealt with how we should bill for all aspects of the writing process.

Yesterday I ran across this link to the rate calculator at FreelanceSwitch on Kivi Leroux Miller’s site.

I thought, what a great tool! Writers are always wondering what they should charge for their services. This tool allows you to input business and personal expense factors as well as the number of hours that you work to find a liveable billing rate.

This tool could also be used by workers who are trying to decide whether or not they should quit their day job and become a freelancer.

(By the way, if you haven’t visited FreelanceSwitch yet, I highly recommend it. There are a lot of nifty articles on freelancing there.)

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

I was thinking about this last night. As I see it there are three options that WAHMs can take with their home businesses during the summer:

• Business as usual
• Gear up
• Slack off

Business as Usual

This is the category that I like to count myself in. While it can be more challenging to work with children from school, I really don’t plan on slowing my writing business down. I’ll continue to juggle the jobs and the kids. An exception is a family vacation that I’ll take later this summer. 

Gear Up

Some WAHMs are students who have the summer off from school. For them, summer can be their greatest time of productivity. They no longer have classes and can accept a lot more work. (I’ve definitely already noticed this trend on some blogs that I follow that I thought had gone dormant.)

Slack Off

For these WAHMs, summer is solely for fun and family. They slow their businesses way down and plan several long family vacations. Summer, for them, can be a time of family bonding. (I admit it, sometimes this option sounds really good to me, my budget just can’t take it.)

How about you? What are your summer plans? 

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

The other day I was reading a forum and came upon a post from a writer who wrote that she could create four 600-word articles in an hour. (I’m not going to link to it because I don’t wish to embarrass anyone.)

Of course, I was a bit intrigued. What was her secret? More to the point, what was I doing wrong that I could only produce one 600-word article in an hour?

As a read further, I came upon this sentence, “… of course, that doesn’t include time I spent on research.” What?

A little bit later in her post, I found these words, “… not including the time it took to download the article.” Huh …

That’s when I realized that some writers don’t know what should be included in their bill for services.

If you’ve written in article that took a half hour of research, fifteen minutes of writing and typing, and fifteen minutes of downloading to a website or attaching to an e-mail to send to a client–you haven’t created an article in fifteen minutes! You’ve created an article in an hour.

The distinction is important for a number of reasons. Here are a few of them:

• First of all, if you only bill for actual writing and typing time you are going to find yourself doing an awful lot of work for free. You run the risk of burning yourself out.
• Secondly, you are setting your clients up for an unrealistic expectation. The next writer they hire may not wish to do her research for free.
• Finally, the quality of your work may be negatively impacted as you rush through the free parts of your work to get to the parts that pay.

What should be included in your invoice? My golden rule of invoicing is that you should include anything that you would not ordinarily do if you were not working on the client’s project. Let me repeat that. Include anything on your invoice that you would not do if you were not working on the client’s project!

That means that if you are assigned to write an article on fruit flies and you spend an hour coming up to speed on the latest in fruit fly research, then that hour needs to be included on your invoice. (Unless you are a fruit fly hobbyist who regularly spends their spare time researching fruit flies.) That means that if you spend twenty minutes using FTP to download the file to the client’s site, that twenty minutes needs to be included on your invoice. Even the time you use to create the invoice should be included on your invoice!

Ideally, the time that you spend marketing your writing business and querying for writing jobs should be prorated and charged to your clients. (Personally, I haven’t fully implemented that.)

There are different ways to make your billing more accurate. Because I used to work for a corporation that made us itemize our time each week, it is very natural for me to record my work on a spreadsheet. I keep a separate spreadsheet for each project. When I begin a project I “log in” to my spreadsheet by recording my start time and a note about what I am doing. If I switch between projects, then I “log out” of the first project and “log in” to the second one.

I pretty much record everything that I do for the client on the spreadsheet. Since I keep each client’s files in a unique subdirectory with unique subdirectories for each individual project, I even include the time that I take to set up those directories.

The benefits of keeping these kinds of records include:

• Historical data. When the client comes back and asks for a second project I can give them a realistic timeframe.
• Rate knowledge. I always know what my hourly rate really was for a particular project. If I find that it was lower than I expected then I can examine whether I need to find some efficiencies in my work (always my first choice) or charge more for my work.

To summarize, I think some writers cheat themselves by not completely understanding what a job contains. Don’t you be one of those writers!

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

I’ve been enjoying Alicia Spark’s blog, WritingSpark.com, for a few weeks now. It’s time that I share it. Alicia’s blog is both professional and entertaining.

I like Alicia’s blog not only because she provides good information for writers, but also because she somehow manages to come up with her own unique twist on topics. When you read one of Alicia’s post you have no doubt where she stands on the topic.

If you haven’t found Alicia’s blog yet, I highly recommend that you take the time to find it now.

Last week Lillie Ammann’s A Writer’s Words, An Editor’s Eye was the “Of Note” blog. Read about it here.

Note: If you’re consistently posting great information and haven’t seen your blog featured in Of Note yet, I apologize. I’ll probably find you soon. I know there are a lot of great blogs out there; I discover more new ones each day. (So many blogs, so little time.)

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

Do you read a lot of blogs? I know that I do. I have a list of favorite blogs that I check almost every day, blogs that I visit occasionally, and other blogs that I discover through links in posts.

Most of the time, I am sorry to say, I read and move on. Once in a while I leave a comment.

I’m cheating myself, do you know why? Here are five good reasons, in no particular order, to leave comments on a blog that you visit:

1. So the blogger will know that you were there. Many bloggers visit the blogs of their commenters. I know that I do this and I know that other bloggers do this as well. If you don’t comment, you’re missing out on traffic.
2. So other bloggers will know that you were there. I know that I’ve clicked on a link in a comment before. I’m sure that other bloggers do the same. Once again, if you don’t comment, you don’t get the traffic.
3. To contribute to the conversation. If you leave a comment you are contributing to the conversation. Like offline conversations, online conversations work best if there are at least two parties involved.
4. To add a sense of community. So what if you don’t have anything to say. Sometimes it’s nice to just to stop in and say hello. As a blogger it’s easy to get sort of attached to the regular commenters, and I know I miss them when they don’t come by.
5. The Dofollow movement. Many bloggers have removed the nofollow code from the blogs. (WritingThoughts has done this.) Essentially what this means is that when you leave a comment you create a link back to  your own blog.

(Updated 9/2/2010: Sadly, due to abuses, this is no longer a Dofollow blog.)

Do you have a reason why it’s good to leave comments on blogs? Leave a comment here and let me know about it.

(Updated: 4/20/2012: Sadly, due to spam, comments are now closed on this post. Thanks to those who left legit comments.)

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

Yesterday on Ann Wayman’s The Golden Pencil, she asked “How Do You Handle Your Phone?” That discussion seemed to center on whether a writer should be available by phone at all times, or if it is acceptable to turn off the phone during periods when you need to concentrate.

I think that is a good question for writers to examine, but I have another phone question for those of us who are work-at-home parents. Actually, the question probably applies to all work-at-home parents, not just those who write. 

How do you deal with the “house” noise when you are on a business call?

By house noise, I mean that background noise that is inevitably there when you have a house full of kids: crying babies, loud kids, dogs barking, and so on.

When my kids were younger it seemed that the moment I got on the phone they had to have my attention. Even now, I have to remind them to be quiet when I am on the phone.

Sometimes I escape to my bedroom (the furthest room in the house from the living room) and shut the door. I have a friend who sits in her car in her garage to make business calls because it is the only please where she can be sure that she won’t be interrupted.

Others may just shrug the noise off and explain to their clients that they work at home.

What about you? What do you do?

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

In the United States of America, May 28, 2007 is Memorial Day. It is a day that we set aside to honor those who were killed in the service of their country.

In a way, it’s too bad that we have to be reminded of the sacrifices that others have made for us. I, too, often go about my day without even thinking once about the losses that others have suffered so that I can enjoy the freedoms that I enjoy.

As I was going through father’s things after his recent death, I found a rare treasure: letters that he wrote home as a young soldier in World War II. They were a peek into a time when my father was much younger than I am now. More than that, they provided a look at a time when people thought so seriously about principles and ideals that they were willing to die for them.

I was touched by his total honesty and by the surprising maturity of a young man still in his twenties. Yes, he was indeed afraid. But, he also knew that he was involved in something bigger than himself. To his mother he wrote, “This is the most significant thing that I have ever done.”

I was fortunate. My father returned, married, and had my brothers and me. Sadly, not every soldier is as fortunate as my father. In every war, there are those fathers, brothers, and sons who do not return. When I truly think about their sacrifice, one day in their memory somehow seems so inadequate.

Other posts about Memorial Day and honoring those who serve include:

• Take Time To Remember at Content Done Better blog. 
• Let’s Never Forget at Gack Ink. 
• God Bless Our Troops at Raes Random Rambles. 
• To Our Soldiers, Past, Present, and Future: We Thank You!
• Something to be proud of at Principled Discovery.

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.