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 […]

Back when I started freelancing in the mid ’90s, I was lucky to get an ongoing gig with a tech magazine that paid me over $1 a word. I didn’t even have to pitch. My editor would call, give me the topic, suggest a couple sources, and I was off. Dream job, eh? Well the […]

For all you blog writers out there, Dustin, who blogs over at the Writer’s Technology Companion, wrote a terrific post today about how to build your blog’s traffic by writing resource posts.
He writes, “Also called ‘flagship posts’ and ‘pillar posts,’ resource posts are entries in your blog that act as resources for your readers—the kind […]

K asks, “Not sure how to post this as a separate question for you that I’ve not seen addressed elsewhere. Since you’ve written books and magazines, I’m hoping you can help me. I’m in the middle of writing Book 2 of a 3-book series on assignment by a children’s book publisher. I’ve published 1500 magazine […]

If you’ve read The Renegade Writer (you have, haven’t you?), you might remember me reminiscing about my ten years of toil in product marketing and advertising, where I reported to various stupid and crazy bosses. That guy over on the left? He was one of my bosses … one of the few who was actually […]

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 […]

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 […]

Vanity Fair has a huge piece on the whole James Frey scandal. I actually really liked his first book in terms of the style of writing and breaking all the writing rules. I am curious, after everything that has happened, would you buy his new book? (A work of fiction, of course) [MonicaBhide}
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I just started teaching the spring session of my class yesterday, and I decided I wanted students to be able to communicate with each other and also to share their work, if they choose to. I thought I’d try out Ning, a service that I’d been hearing about. It lets you create social networks (sort […]

You could say I’m a slow learner. I’ve been writing and editing professionally for more than 20 years, and only this year did I realize that I’ve been approaching my freelance career backwards. The conventional wisdom suggests that success comes to the freelancer who studies the markets and pitches stories that she thinks editors are […]