Skip to main content

Home/ LumpysCorner/ Group items tagged working

Rss Feed Group items tagged

John Lemke

How To Become A Prolific Writer While Holding Down A Day Job | Positive Writer - 0 views

  • The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), continued to work day jobs throughout his life.
  • Other authors who held down day jobs throughout their writing careers include Bram Stoker, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.
  • she wrote the bestselling book Interview With The Vampire while working her day job as an insurance claims examiner.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Anne Rice
  • Having a day job makes it imperative that I allocate time for writing. I insure I write at least 2 hours before I go to work come rain or shine. And I do this by following my rituals every morning without fail.
  • Regardless of what time I work (shift work), I wake up at least 3 hours prior and like clockwork, 1) I brush my teeth, 2) make breakfast, 3) sit down at my desk, 4) check emails, 5) check in on my social connections and finally 5) after stretching my legs for a moment, I write on cue for at least two hours.
  • ake note of the things you do consistently every day before and after work.
  • Create a space of time within your current daily rituals for writing every day. Make sure it’s at a time of day that works best for you.
  • Commit.
  • I highly recommend creating a writing sanctuary for yourself, somewhere you only go to write, and therefore, your mind will associate being there with writing.
  •  
    A good PMA oriented article.
John Lemke

5 Tips For Working from Home - 0 views

  •  
    More and more of us are going to be working from home. These are 5 great tips to start with.
John Lemke

Why the Freelance Dream of Working in P.J.s is Total B.S. - 0 views

  •  
    I couldn't agree more with the author. You do not get to "set your own schedule"... the work schedules your life and the sooner you accept that, the better off you will be.
John Lemke

» How You Can Make Money At Home Through MadContent : Freedom With Writing - 0 views

  • MadContent.com is a bit unique in that they cater to customers and clients who are in need of SEO services. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a method that involves strategically placing specific keywords at predetermined intervals in articles, product descriptions, and more. Through using SEO, customers and clients of MadContent.com may be able to boost their search engine rankings organically when the specified keywords are searched for.
  • However, MadContent does require prior experience. Specifically, when applying to work for the company through the online application form, you will be required to submit a sample of your work. Prior SEO experience is a plus, and work completed through the site will be required to meet certain SEO requirements. Understanding the basics of SEO and being apply to apply the strategy into your work is necessary. Further, assignments are provided to you via Elance.com, so you do need to have a valid Elance.com account in order to apply to work for this company.
  •  
    Mad Content requires experience and is SEO focused. You will have to submit a sample and meet certain SEO requirements on all assignments submitted. 
John Lemke

Seth's Blog: On doing the work - 0 views

  •  
    Since I have gone public about being a writer, I am asked all the time about "how do you do it". What I notice the most is that folks think it is easy and automatic. This post about "doing the work" not only applies to writers but everything you try to achieve.
John Lemke

» "Is there really writing work out there?" : Freedom With Writing - 0 views

  • How, then, do writing opportunities work? To be paid for writing, you need to look for a person with two characteristics: They’ve got money to spare. They’re looking for writers. This could be: A magazine editor who is looking for feature articles. An aristocrat or multi-billionaire who wants to support the career of an aspiring artist. A blogger who makes money from advertisements, or from selling information products, but is too busy to do all their blogging themselves. A book publisher who is looking for the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter. A business owner who needs help from a writer to promote their business. Do you see where this is going? There are writing opportunities out there, if you know where to look, and if you know the right people.
  • First, the more money a potential client has, the more they’ll be willing to pay you. Bloggers and content creators don’t typically earn much money from advertising. That’s why revenue sharing sites, which share advertising revenue with writers in exchange for content, often pay a relatively low rate. Magazine editors and book publishers are somewhere in the middle. They pay reasonably well, but they’re looking for extremely high quality, so you’ve got to be real good to get their attention. Business owners who have a steady income usually pay the most generous fees to writers. Businesses have a budget for marketing, so they’ve got cash to splash.
John Lemke

4 Strategies for Better Time Management (and Bigger Paychecks) as a Freelance Writer - 0 views

  • The most successful freelance writers are those who know how to manage their time to get the most quality work done.
  • I am a human who writes, and I need to be fully energized and focused to do my best work.
  • it’s absolutely necessary to track your time to ensure you’re properly compensated for your work.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • start with the task I want to work on the least. I’m then more motivated to complete that less-fun task so I can get to the fun stuff faster.
  •  
    Time is money. Use it well!
John Lemke

A Day in the Life of Maggie Koerth-Baker | - 0 views

  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Word docs and/or Evernote
  • Livescribe pen. The Livescribe allows me to record audio and take notes, with the audio linked up to the notes, so that later I can find exactly the audio quotes and information I want quickly, just by tapping on the note that corresponds to what I’m looking for.
  • I’m experimenting with a new organizational system that I’m calling Just Put Everything in Evernote. All my research notes, papers, Livescribe notes and audio, everything … it all goes into Evernote, organized by story, and I can find it easily on my phone or my computer, even when I’m offline. The new Livescribe pen I got even uploads the audio and notes to Evernote automatically, whenever it has access to wifi.
  • I increasingly do my writing in Google Docs. Or Drive, or whatever they call it now. It’s been worth it for the couple of times I’ve already needed to access stuff when I’m away from my computer. And it helps with the nagging fear that I’m going to lose, damage, or destroy the laptop at some point, halfway through writing a story. On the same lines, I periodically save everything to Dropbox.
  • EasyCrop for quickly adjusting image
  • I do all my presentations in Prezi
  • Twitter and Facebook are both necessary for my work and a huge time suck
  •  
    Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor for Boing! Boing!, a freelance writer and a columnist for The New Your Times Magazine. In this interview she discusses her life, motherhood and her work flow.
John Lemke

The Ten Worst Pieces of Writing Advice You Will Ever Hear (and Probably Already Have) |... - 0 views

  • Take that advice beyond the beginning stages, though, and what you get are stories that really should move the reader but don’t, either because the emotions are all related from the outside or because the narrative doesn’t provide the sort of dense, information-rich substrata upon which complex characters are built.
  • Which leads me to my second point: Your story is about Gina, at forty, deciding whether or not to leave her boyfriend. Are you really going to spend half your story showing us Gina’s white-trash childhood in Elbridge, Michigan (a key bit of backstory)? Or are you just going to cut to the chase, provide a few key details, and move on?
  • But push this advice too far, and again, you’ll get stuck writing mediocre fiction. Because sometimes the things that don’t work are actually important. They don’t work not because they’re the wrong things, but because they’re the hard, ambitious, at-the-very-edge-of-what-you-even-know-how-to-say-things, and the only way to land them is to dig deeper, work harder, and sometimes even (god help you) add rather than cut.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • To keep advancing you have to stretch your limits. And sometimes that means writing from the point of view of someone who is super not you.
  • Language is your Swiss army knife, and you can’t do shit like this with just the knife and the corkscrew.
  •  
    I must admit, I have heard most of these. However, I don't fully agree with all the points.
John Lemke

Writer Unboxed » Imagining Beyond One's Own Experience, or What the Fiction W... - 0 views

  • Imagining is the job of the fiction writer. This is what we do, every time we sit down in front of a blank page. It seems as if we’re working with no more than a keyboard or pen and paper, but that’s not true. We have at our disposal every person we’ve ever known, every experience we’ve ever had, seen, heard and felt. Our ingredients are the people who have ignored us and caused us to search our brains for reasons why, people whom we’ve admired, both intimately and from a distance, and people whom we’ve tried to emulate. People who love us despite our faults; people we can’t stand despite our efforts to be better people ourselves.
  •  
    A great read on putting the writer in another's shoes. If you desire to do fiction, it is certainly worth the time to read.
John Lemke

How to Defeat Writer's Block | Writing Forward - 0 views

  • Physical ailments:
  • Mental and emotional stress and distractions
  • Lazy days
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • You’d just rather do anything in the world other than work on your writing project
  • Avoidance and procrastination: Sometimes we go out of our way to avoid a difficult writing challenge.
  • Eat well, exercise, and drink plenty of water. Schedule time for rest and relaxation. Don’t run yourself down.
  • A Few, Final Writing Tips for Combating Writer’s Block
  • if you have two projects going, you can rotate back and forth to maintain your interest in both.
  • Get advice from other writers. Often, they’ll see a solution where you see no way out.
  •  
    While different things work for different writers, I think this is a great look at writer's block.
John Lemke

How to Become a Freelance Writer in 900 Simple Steps - Part 1: Risky Business | LitReactor - 0 views

  • What exactly do freelance copywriters write? Everything! From ad copy to newsletters, from policies to blogs, from business proposals to brochures, and from catalog blurbs to t-shirt taglines, there's nothing off-limits. James told me she's worked on everything from tweets for non-profits to ghost writing a book for a motivational speaker to writing taglines for Nike. So, if you are after variety, it appears that the freelance thing delivers. Sure, some freelances have specialties, but generally speaking, they are just really skilled at writing and they help businesses who need someone with that skill to produce written content. Unlike traditional writers, these people don't get their names in the byline, but they do get paid hourly for their work. Did you catch that? HOUR-LY.
John Lemke

Why Should Freelance Writers Register for Freelance Writing Jobs through the Federal Go... - 0 views

  •  
    A detailed guide on how to become a writer and/or editor for government work.
John Lemke

» Review of Lightspeed - 0 views

  • They pay their authors 8 cents a word and publish stories of up to 7,500 words in length, although their general preference is for stories that are around 5,000 words. They do not publish stories under 1,500 words in length. They do occasionally publish unsolicited reprints, but in those situations they pay 2 cents per word.
  • Lightspeed accepts less than 1% of the work submitted to them. They also reply to all submissions within a week. They request that all authors wait a week before submitting another short story if their work is rejected.
John Lemke

How To Earn More From Your Writing: The Simple Yet Neglected Secret | Write to Done - 0 views

  •  
    This article lists a number of ways to capitalize on selling the rights to your work.
John Lemke

New, inexpensive production materials boost promise of hydrogen fuel (Feb. 21, 2014) - 0 views

  • The trouble with solar fuel production is the cost of producing the sun-capturing semiconductors and the catalysts to generate fuel. The most efficient materials are far too expensive to produce fuel at a price that can compete with gasoline.
  • "In order to make commercially viable devices for solar fuel production, the material and the processing costs should be reduced significantly while achieving a high solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency," says
  • Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Without fancy equipment, high temperature or high pressure, we made a nanoporous semiconductor of very tiny particles that have a high surface area," says Choi, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation. "More surface area means more contact area with water, and, therefore, more efficient water splitting."
  • "Since no one catalyst can make a good interface with both the semiconductor and the water that is our reactant, we choose to split that work into two parts," Choi says. "The iron oxide makes a good junction with bismuth vanadate, and the nickel oxide makes a good catalytic interface with water. So we use them together." The dual-layer catalyst design enabled simultaneous optimization of semiconductor-catalyst junction and catalyst-water junction.
  • In a study published last week in the journal Science, Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
  •  
    I am an advocate of switching to hydrogen for combustion engines.  One of the best reasons is that combustion produces water.  Furthermore, it is much safer than most people believe.  (Your car is not going to turn into the Hindenburg.) In Ben Bova's Book "Break Throughs" he talked of huge floating solar powered hydrogen producing plants.  In Room's "The Hype About Hydrogen" he painfully points out that H2 production is still not cost effective enough to complete with Gasoline.  That said, research like this leaves us hope for the future.
John Lemke

AJ Kohn talks Hummingbird, social, authority, writing and MUCH more! » SEO Co... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • People scan and don’t read, so you have to format your content to meet that reality.
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Writers still concentrate too much on the text and not enough on formatting and presentation. Making the content you create readable, portable and memorable is what will gain success.
  • The other thing that I think was important was commenting (with links) on other content.
  • I believe in 90-9-1 participation inequality. Comments are the area on a piece of content where the 9 (contributors) and the 1 (creators) are most frequently found. Those are the people I wanted to connect with because I had a better chance of them carrying my content to other places. And they did.
  • Social media is a key factor in SEO and Internet marketing for businesses and individuals. You rock at social media, sharing across multiple platforms and gaining reach. Social media can be intimidating and time consuming. What advice do you have for managing individual as well as business social accounts? Well you hit on the big issue; it’s time consuming and most people don’t want to invest that amount of time. So that’s the first thing. You can’t half-ass it and expect to do very well. One of the things I try to do is make my content on these platforms consistent, readable and memorable. On Twitter I decided to use a convention for the vast majority of my tweets. [Activity]: [Title] [URL] [Comment] [Hashtag]
  • The last one is to not do work for free.
  • Well, I’m seeing more and more evidence of what I describe happening and believe that Knowledge Graph Optimization (KGO) is going to be more and more important moving forward.
  •  
    Many good points about writing in this new era are brought out in this interview.
John Lemke

» Making Money From Home: Is Constant-Content Worth Your Time? : Freedom With... - 0 views

  • Set Your Rate.
  • Write What You Want.
  • Wait For a Buyer. The downside to working through Constant-Content, however, is that there is no guarantee your work will sell. Ever.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • You can sell usage rights only, which allows you to resell your article over and over again.
John Lemke

» How to Get Paid as an "Elite" Writer with iWriter : Freedom With Writing - 0 views

  • iWriter is perfect for both the beginning and the established writer that wants to add another writing site to their list.
  • The range of these topics is considerably greater than most writing sites and includes pretty much anything you would want to write about and probably a few things you never considered.
  • Unlike many sites, there is no article submission required for approval. Don’t let this throw you and make you think less of this site. The site simply uses other methods to get and keep quality writers. This is great because you can get started immediately instead of waiting for an editor to approve your work.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • You can select the type of writings you want to do. Your choices are articles, ebooks and rewrites.
  • A rather odd note is that the writing block area specifically tells you not to copy and paste from other software into the block. However the FAQ suggests doing so. I recommend the copy and paste method simply because if there is a glitch during submission then there is little chance of recovery and you would need to start over. As an alternate, you can copy and past your work from the writing block into your word processor.
  • Essentially, you have to write at least 30 articles and have a rating of 4 stars to move to the Premium level. Once you hit 4.6 stars you move into the Elite tier. The only ratings that count are those from clients, iWriter only counts your articles. Because of this it’s important to do a good job for the clients and it’s also important to pay attention to the types of clients that you choose. Clients that reject often and are overly demanding may not be worth the effort.
  • Payment is made once your account reaches the minimum of $20 and is paid to your Paypal account.
  • Set up notifications for the topics that interest you
  • Get up early on Monday. Monday is when many new articles are added to the system.
  • Take many small articles at first.
  •  
    This one looks very promising.
John Lemke

Need a last minute Christmas gift? How about a $12,000 3D printed gun? | Computerworld ... - 0 views

  •  
    While 12K is very pricey for a M1911 pistol, the buyer would be paying for the novelty. These limited edition pistols are printed by 3-D printers. Also of note, unlike many other printed guns, these printed models seem to work well having survived thousands of test fire round.
1 - 20 of 39 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page