The Renegade Writer Blog

Thanks to Justin for pointing out to us that someone at amazon.com has a sense of humor — or is  simply a frustrated freelance writer filled with existential angst.
Check out the page for The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock. The best quip about the mixup in the comments below will win a signed copy. [...]

I was doing a New Year’s cleaning of my computer files when I ran across my very first clip: a review of a text on dialectology for the journal Language, which I wrote while a grad student in Slavic Linguistics at UC Berkeley. In my first query letter sometime later, I mentioned that I had [...]

This post is by Monica Bhide, who teaches our e-course Introduction to Food Writing, which starts on January 11.
A few years ago, I signed up with an agent and sent out my first formal book proposal. I had published two books earlier — the first one based on an idea that I sent [...]

I have thousands of bylines that attest to the fact that I make my living as a writer. But it’s my keyboard that tells the story of the tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent at this desk working at my craft.

This is a guest post by Pat Curry, who teaches our e-course on writing for trade magazines. Next session starts January 11!
I took my daughter’s car in today to Jiffy Lube to get the oil changed, largely because we had a $3 coupon. It was a $32.99 service. I walked out having paid $76, singing [...]

Last week, like millions of Americans, I sat down to watch the season finale of one of my favorite reality shows, The Amazing Race. OK, I know a lot of people think reality television is dumb — and a lot of it IS dumb — but I’ll argue that The Amazing Race is an outstanding [...]

A couple of weeks ago, someone posted a comment on this blog saying that in dissing content mills like Associated Content we “just don’t get it,” and bragged that she earns $1,200 per month on her articles on Associated Content and similar sites. (When I checked, I saw that the writer had over 1,000 articles [...]

In August, I vowed to never again take on an assignment that had red flags, such as low pay or an unreasonable deadline. I even promised to turn down assignments that simply gave me a bad feeling in my gut. I had had problems with accepting any old assignment that came my way, sometimes with [...]

In my post Extreme Productivity in early August, I talked about how I had my husband change my password to a time-suck writer’s forum and I downloaded a free Firefox extension called BlockSite to block other distracting sites. For a couple of days my fingers itched to type in those web addresses, but then the [...]

This guest post is by Elaine Grant, a former editor at Inc. magazine, a longtime freelance writer, and the health and science reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio.
I’ve now taught my eight-week class, “Magazine Writing Basics,” several times. And I’ve noticed a pattern: my students tend to get stuck when they get to that point [...]