The Renegade Writer Blog

Katrina asks, “Recently, an interviewee requested an interview be conducted via instant messenger. Ultimately, we conducted a phone interview, but I was left wondering: How would quotes from an instant messenger interview be attributed? Can they be enclosed in quotation marks or should they be paraphrased? For that matter, what about email interviews? The only […]

Hilarious! Dennis Cass should be in standup (maybe he is?) … his timing is perfect and he’s 50x funnier than Jerry Seinfeld. My favorite line: “You know what’s funny about the Oprah question … I would have just called you and said ‘I’m going on Oprah.’ I wouldn’t have let you come to me.” [db]
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This Monday I turned some assigned recipes to one of my editors. For some reason she couldn’t open up the file, so she asked me to send it again with the copy pasted into the body of my e-mail, which I did with a note asking her to confirm receipt. Later I sent her the […]

Carol asks, “Over the years, much of my freelance work has come from a non-profit organization that is somewhat controversial due to its conservative views and religious affiliation. As a result, I’m hesitant to include this organization in my queries. My question: Is this fear warranted? I wonder if I’m doing myself in by […]

Last week I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, waiting for my name to be called. After an interminable wait (I was feverish and in a lot of pain), the door opened and the nurse called, “Diane?” Not me. I turned back to my copy of People. No one else in the waiting room […]

A couple of weeks ago, in a comment on my post about finding travel writing inspiration from your vacation, Chris asked a very good question about travel writing. (Chris, I can’t tell from your name whether you’re male or female, but I’ll roll the dice and assume you’re female!) She and her fiance love […]

Kate asks, “I’ve been trying to break a certain section of a particular national magazine for a few months now, and have been considering re-packaging a nutrition article I did for [Magazine X] over the summer. When my subscription of the other national mag [Magazine Y] arrived in the mail yesterday, I saw that […]

Denise asks: I’m a full time mommy trying to turn my “hobby” of writing into a real profession. I’ve been stringing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering school districts and city halls for the Metro Briefs section. The trouble is that I don’t get a byline unless they deem the subject worth more […]

Eve Adamson is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living, a book that I turn to whenever my work is driving me crazy. I interviewed Eve to get her take on the Zen of writing.
How does the practice of Zen relate to magazine writing, book authoring, or copywriting? I think many people […]

In my last episode here on RW blog, I encouraged you to think about your vacation plans, and how you might use them as story fodder. I just noticed that there were a couple of comments on that post that I didn’t see, and I didn’t want to let them evaporate into the void!
So, Tiffany […]