The Renegade Writer Blog

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 [...]

Thanks to everyone who filled out my Renegade Writer survey — and congratulations to Colette Martin, who won a free half-hour phone coaching session with yours truly. I really appreciate that so many people took the time out of their busy day to offer their valuable feedback.
I received great feedback from 131 writers, and I [...]

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.

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 [...]

Saying No is something I have trouble with; if someone approaches me with an assignment, I’m (1) flattered, even though after 12 years of freelancing this is not a rare occurrence, and (2) excited at the prospect of moolah. So even if an assignment is not ideal, in the past I’ve typically said Yes. But [...]

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 [...]

Last week, I quit a writing project that was worth more than $10,000.
When I got the project, I was coming off of a four-month famine, and I needed the dough. So I ignored the red flags. First, the expert co-author took so long playing hardball with the publisher that the deadlines were crunched. Then, she [...]

Before I jump into today’s post, I’d like to let you know that my next e-course on breaking into magazines, which has helped students land assignments from magazines ranging from Pizza Today to Woman’s Day, starts on Monday, August 3. That’s just a week away! Also, due to popular demand (no, really!), I’ve added a [...]