The Renegade Writer Blog

Last week Linda and I conducted a telephone mentoring session with the writer who’d won the drawing for the free half-hour of mentoring for signing up for our Renegade Writer e-courses. Both of us were impressed with this part-time writer’s magazine credits. We’re talking top-of-the-heap consumer publications that have a certain cachet.
One thing that struck […]

Tonight I got an e-mail from a self-help guru announcing that for the low price of $597 (which I could pay in three installments), I could learn the secrets of staying up in a down economy — and get some free CDs as well. Smarm factor aside, something in the sales pitch got my attention. […]

I’m sure a lot of you have seen or heard about a new trend in magazines, asking readers, i.e. nonprofessional writers, to provide all the stories in an issue.
I think we’d better get used to this, since my prediction is this isn’t just going to be a one-off experiment. People are really becoming comfortable with […]

Career columnist Penelope Trunk wrote an interesting blog post last month about Twitter — specifically about why it’s good to jump into stuff like Twittering and blogging when you have no idea what you’re doing — or even if you don’t “get” it. On a grander scale, I believe in this advice, too. Writing a […]

This morning one of my editors let me know that a project I had pitched them had been reshaped and she invited me to work on part of it. Suffice it to say that the part she offered was the least compelling part of the project, the recipe development. I was also annoyed because she’d […]

Recently one of my editors assigned me two features based on pitches I’d sent to her over the last year. She asked me to get back to her with some recipe ideas to go along with them by the end of the week. I looked the pitches over; one of them was very familiar to […]

In the last few months, I’ve been having all kinds of trouble securing interviews — and when I do land interviews, about half the time the person isn’t there at the appointed time. As I was thinking (read: ranting) about this, I realized that my troubles started about the same time that I stopped sending […]

I’ve been pulling together my travel writing workshop, and happened to be preparing my materials on ethics, when a lovely little travel writing ethics scandal conveniently popped up in the news.
You’ve probably already heard about the fracas surrounding the new tell-all travel writing book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High […]

Thanks to a post in today’s GalleyGat, I spent the last hour reading the details of an angry romance author’s vendetta against the writer of a (gasp!) 3-star amazon.com review. I read the review — since taken down by amazon.com presumably at the angry author’s request — and it’s fairly pleasant, nothing that would get […]

… than announcing to the world, “I’m trying to figure out this blogging thing” or “What’s Facebook all about and how can I use it?” In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard or read variations of these sentiments among writers and journalists and it cracks me up. All I can hear in my head […]