Have you ever done a white paper? Marketing materials? A web site for a small catering company?

What do all of these projects have in common? Not only can they be complex, but more importantly, all of these projects can involve an organization's image. Any time you come anywhere near image, you run into the situation that many different people within the organization (the head, the second in command, the marketing people, the lead designer, and more) all want input. And in fact they often should have input. Just not at the expense of the project. -- Read more

The old adage "Write what you know" has some truth to it, but some people take it far too literally. If people only wrote about what they knew at the time there would be no science fiction, no fantasy, no speculation toward the future, no dreaming ... all that would be left would be dry first-person experiences.

I prefer to take the phrase a little differently: Write what you Know. Know, as in Truth, as in the greater Truths that bind us all together. Such a definition doesn't rely on knowledge of particular details. It's more an awareness of the human condition and universal laws than whether you actually know what it feels like to be shot.  -- Read more

A big deal is often made about organization, sometimes too big a deal. However, sometimes without the big O you make your job far more difficult than it should be.

First, you have to look at whether the items you're trying to organize are digital or physical. I'm going to focus on digital here. In part, this means that I don't generally recommend printing out material unless you absolutely need to. Too often, people print out material that they really didn't need to, keep it for a few days, toss it in a pile, and then eventually just recycle or toss it out completely unused. Better to not print it out unless you absolutely need to. (If saying so makes me a tree hugger, I guess I should go outside and start hugging some trees. -- Read more

I'm blessed of late with clients who pay very promptly. Early, for the most part! But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't keep on top of things. To this end, I made sure and to set up a project management and invoice/billing tool so that I could easily create invoices through it, mark them as paid through it, and more importantly be reminded when the invoice came due.

For the first time yesterday I got a reminder that an invoice was overdue. I looked and sure enough, it hadn't been paid, though it was for a client that tends to be early time after time.  -- Read more

Yes, this title is a little mercenary, but that's what freelancers are. Mercenaries. We just don't use lances these days (except for freelance Renaissance Faire lancers). We use pens and laptops and video cameras. The being self-employed thing means that sometimes we have to get a bit creative in order to do certain things. -- Read more

Earlier I had posted about my quest to find project management, invoicing, and customer relationship management tools that fit my needs and work style. For a bit I had settled on a pair of open source tools that I installed on my Linux-based Web server: -- Read more

In sports and other physical activities there's a lot of focus on proper form. The reason for this focus is the simple fact that the human body is built to work in certain ways, and if you insist on doing something--especially at a high performance level--incorrectly for how the body is put together, you're going to hurt yourself. -- Read more

I'm not the first person to say this, and I won't be the last:

There is no such thing as writer's block.

Everyone gets stuck once in a while, yes. But there's this whole mystique about "writer's block," like it's this grand excuse and makes you a true artist suffering for your art because you just can't seem to get anything done. One of the best suggestions I can give to anyone creative is to banish the whole term from their vocabulary. -- Read more

One of the keys to professionalism as a freelancer is the ability to adhere to a style guide and produce work not only of a consistent quality, but in a consistent way, so that it looks like it belongs among the client's other content.

I know this is an area where I can improve, mostly due to being easily distracted by small shiny objects and forgetting what the style guide says for a particular client. Ways I deal with this include keeping their style guide reference open so I can easily consult it, or creating styles in in, say, my word processor so I can just apply the style "Clientname: Subheader 1" and move on. Some clients even send templates so you can just apply their styles--though these templates have the complication of needing to work with your software. -- Read more

It used to be that freelancing involved a lot of postal mail, and sometimes couriers (which some publishers seemed to use like they were inter-office mail), whether you were sending typed pages or files on floppy disks. Then faxing got involved on occasion, at least for things like contracts. When I did my first book way back when ("Using Eudora" for the curious), it took a bit to convince the editors to let us submit the chapters through email. After all, it was a book about email, so wouldn't that be a cool tie-in? -- Read more