The Renegade Writer Blog

I’m reading a book by Lama Surya Das about Buddhist values, and there’s a lot of talk about the beginner’s mind. I also learned about this concept when I studied shorin ryu karate. The beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness and the belief that there’s always more to learn.
I think the beginner’s mind is [...]

I was taking a look at a book called The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, and one of the habits stood out to me: “Never feeling good enough.”
This is what holds students in my e-course back from reaching for their dream magazines (until I make them, [...]

In a guest post on the Zen Habits blog, Albert from UrbanMonk.net describes the 5% trick:
My favorite tool at this stage is the 5% statement, created by Nathaniel Branden, who is widely considered to be the father of the self-esteem movement. It works by allowing you to take steps in small increments. Trying to change [...]

For a couple of days at the beginning of last week, I felt completely unmotivated: more blob than human. One part of me wanted to market, work on my assignments, and generally be active and productive. But another, stronger, part of me wanted to lie on the couch and surf the Internet all week.
Then I [...]

Today’s blog post is by Monica Bhide, who teaches Introduction to Food Writing, which starts on March 2.
A year ago, I started a vision board. You have heard of these things, right? A board where you post your goals, your dreams, your hopes. You put the board up where you can see it each [...]

“Acting as if” is a personal development trick where you imagine how someone who’s in a position you aspire to would act, and then do those things yourself. For example, say you want to be a best-selling author. What would she do? Chances are she would set aside a certain amount of time to write [...]

Let’s face it — freelance writing is scary. When checks don’t come in, you feel like you’re on the brink of economic collapse on a personal level. When you need to call an editor, your mind floods with images of the editor slamming down the phone in your ear (but not before telling you not [...]

I’ve been teaching Magazine Writing Basics for a while now, and when I taught my last session, I added two phone consultations to the e-course – one during the first week, and one at the end of the 8-week class. I wanted to speak with my students because I really feel that teaching magazine writing [...]

The moment happened three weeks ago. My husband told me our auto insurance company needed the title to a car that had been totaled. My stomach sank. I knew the title was in our safe deposit box over at the bank. When my son was a toddler he’d wreaked havoc in my office, picking labels [...]

Renegade Writer instructor Alison Stein Wellner and I have decided to out ourselves in 2009. No, not like that … like this:
We’re slobs! We decided that in 2009, we’re going to clean up our freelancing lives, and that starts with our offices. We’ll start by showing you photos of what we’re dealing with (believe us, [...]