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I’m a freelancer, but I have a couple of contract gigs that play a big role in my monthly and daily cycles. I’m the science editor at BoingBoing.net, a technology and culture blog with 6 million monthly readers. I also have a monthly column with The New York Times Magazine.

The rest of the day really varies a lot, depending on what I have on my plate at that given time. I have ADHD and it’s really easy for me to get distracted and be unproductive, so I have lots of little tricks I rely on to keep me focused throughout the day. I used to use a timer on my computer a lot, just to have something that, periodically, forced me to look up and think about what I was doing and what I had to do next. But I find now that the two hours between breast pump sessions actually does that job pretty well. I also jump back and forth between stuff on my to-do list, depending on what I feel motivated to do. If I just can’t get myself to write during a given two-hour block, I’m better off answering email or sending out interview requests than just sitting there, staring at a blank page.

Skype, Call Recorder, and Stickies.

The Writer’s Market and Mediabistro’s How to Pitch guides both offer information on their listed magazines for what percentage of the publication is freelanced out, and of pay rates. If the magazine you want is in there, you’re set with the info you need.

Many magazines have their writer’s guidelines right on their website these days. Poke around there and see if you can turn up any “write for us” information.

Don’t overlook the insights the mighty search engine might bring you if you do a search on “pay at X magazine.”

It’s no longer enough to simply write content. Everybody’s doing that.

standing out from the crowd by finding a place that seems a bit less dangerous (finding your “content” niche). This would be a good call.

cynic comes from a Greek word meaning “dog-like, currish, churlish.”

The word cynosure comes from a Greek word meaning “dog’s tail.” This was the name given by the Greeks to the northern constellation Ursa Minor, the “Small Bear” in whose tail is the Pole-star, also known as the North Star. Because the North Star is bright and a means of finding the direction of north, the word cynosure acquired the figurative meaning of “something that is bright and serves as a guide.”

The conjunction while, for example, tends to pop up in contexts in which a different conjunction may be the better choice.

temporal conjunction

to introduce clauses that express opposition

While visualizing your story may seem like the right way to approach writing, it turns out that for full-time writers, the brain performs a bit differently. When Dr. Lotze watched writers from a competitive creative writing program perform the same tests, he found that experienced writers, while brainstorming, used parts of their brains associated with speech instead of vision.

Novice writers, Lotze suggests, are more likely to watch the story unfold like a movie inside their heads.

The “just the facts” approach to your website may cover all of the bullet points you need covered, but it’s not engaging enough to keep people around.

TextMaster.com is an interesting little site that is fairly new but already has a reputation for being a good way to get started as a freelance writer. They make the claim that they are writer centered and by all accounts are fair and honest.

To become a member of the site, you simply sign up and verify your email address. Then you can go and explore the site.

There are 3 categories on TextMaster that will be of immediate interest to you: Copywriter, Translator, and Proofreader. These are the 3 areas that you can apply to for work.

Everything Google is doing, from Google+ to semantic search serves its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

In order for Google to provide the most relevant search results, it looks beyond the keywords to find context of your query based on your connections and social signals, +1’s, shares, likes etc..

Google Authorship ties you to your content no matter where you publish on the web where “rel=authorship” is installed.

My mantra is to do it instead of thinking about doing it. If I catch myself doing the latter I just switch to doing instead of thinking. Easier said than done for me, but I’ve gotten better at that. But there aren’t enough hours in the day. Or not if you’re also going to stay healthy and be a part of your family and not get burnt out. So things fall off the table, even more so if you’re hell bent on creating really great work. Yet, I find that quality is what wins at the end of the day and that solves a lot of other problems.

And if they share it, you gain greater readership. So I encourage writers to think of the entire canvas when creating content. Think about the headers in your piece and about the images you’ll use to enrich the story.

Under the directive, right holders have the power to control the online communication to the public of their works – the so called "communication to the public right".