Writing category feed
To all you writing bloggers out there, I was probably one of your 10,000,000 subscribers. Today (or yesterday) I unsubscribed. Dimes to dollars, you don’t care. You have about 999,999 subscribers to read your drivvel or buy your junk. In case you’re wondering, though, here’s why I unsubscribed.
Writing
Posts filed under Writing
I made my first blog guest appearance last week over at Piotr’s tech-money-Linux-life-win blog. If you’re interested in reading my ramblings on taking the first steps to freelance writing, you can click right here and read the post. It’s accompanied by an interesting graphic, which I’m having a hard time deciphering. It’s either a spotted praying mantis or an out of focus fountain pen.
What prompted this philanthropic content for Piotr’s wayward blog, you might ask. It wasn’t exactly philanthropic. As you can see at the end of the post, there’s a nice little link to my new project, Write Translation. I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about getting traffic, until I remembered the obvious. Piotr’s blog is a) cool, b) trafficked and c) relevant.
He was kind enough to write up a guest post for Write Translation, which you can also read (and simultaneously increase my Google Analytics hit count) by clicking here.
In case you’re curious, Write Translation is a little project dedicated to all those non-native (English) writers. Those people who are legitimately skilled at stringing together words, just…in a different language. There’s a problem among writers, native and non, that ends up with clients expecting a 5,000 word article for two bucks. Honestly, it hasn’t gotten that bad yet, but it’s getting there.
So, Write Translation is made for all those wordsmiths that just can’t English. With luck, it will help them English gooder. At the very least, it’ll be fun.
As a final plus, I have learned to spell – but not yet pronounce – Piotr’s last name.
K R Z Y Z E K.
Recently, I’ve been branching out my writing from guaranteed sources like DemandStudios and light-weight pay-per-submission sites like AssociatedContent to include higher-end content providers like Constant-Content. Unfortunately, I’ve been spoiled by the DemandStudios copy editors who, while often infuriating in their nitpickiness, actually tell you what’s wrong with an article. The legendary editor at Constant-Content is not quite so kind, and often rejects articles for a single grammar or spelling error. Once the article is rejected, it’s deleted, so you’ve lost everything (including the summary, which can’t be included in the uploaded document). Yikes.
In one such round of submitting-rejection-editing-resubmitting-rerejecting-and-so-on, I realized that I was spending an extra 5 minutes either retyping the summary and keywords or hunting them down in a spreadsheet. While editing photos, a little light bulb went off. Documents have properties, too!
Even if you’re saving an article that you’re posting on a site that doesn’t auto-delete all rejections, use these properties to store information on the document. Microsoft Office has a toolbar with the default property fields, which are good enough for nearly all documents.
- Author: This is, I’m assuming, going to be your name.
- Title: The title of the document
- Subject: What’s it about? Not to be confused with Category.
- Keywords: Comma or semi-colon separated.
- Category: The category it will fall under on a submission website.
- Status: Fill in anything here. I use it to record the submission site and current status.
- Comments: Record the descriptive summary in this box.
When you submit the article, just open up the properties, cut and paste. Extra benefit: you can filter your documents by the website they are published with.
I'm Becky. I write this blog. From time to time, someone else will write this blog. I like WordPress, hiking and puppies.
You can hire me for WordPress or PHP odds n' ends on oDesk.