Society Experiance

America's Next Great Writer - Every once in a while a writer comes along that demands we take notice; one that avails just the right meter, tempo, and rhythm; one that can engulf us in a story and keep us glued throughout 200 pages; one that offers a style sure to be emulated by his aspiring peers, both of his generation and generations to come. Nelson Pahl is just that writer. With simultaneous debut releases, entitled Bee Balms & Burgundy and Two for Tuesday, Pahl flexes a literary muscle short in supply today one that whispers,  legend in the making.  Although the hardcover version of Bee Balms & Burgundy won t hit stores until March, I had the pleasure of reading the pre-release, limited edition eBook version, which is available at www.NelsonPahl.com and www.IndieMill.com. There, you can even read a sample chapter, to whet your appetite. Bee Balms & Burgundy is a charming story of latent lifelong love and the quest to conquer all that stands in its way. Nick M...

All You Need To Know About Agents --For Now - The agent issue is such an emotional one for writers. Having one is a huge validation. I was fortunate to sign with an agent while still writing my first novel and it was wonderful being able to work and know that someone was waiting for what I was writing.  But the eagerness to have that feeling often pushes writers to make poor decisions when it comes to the hunt for an agent. With some thinking, solid preparation and research it is possible to hook up with an agent and have a satisfying relationship with him or her. Here are five crucial points to help you with the process.  1. Do You Need An Agent?  You've probably heard the oft-cited fact that most publishers these days don't read unsolicited manuscripts. But that only means that the editor hasn't been contacted beforehand. If you send a query letter and the editor asks to see your book or book proposal, you can send it without going through an agent.  However, if th...

All The Tired Horsepowers - Hearing of the massive layoffs in the local car factories erodes a bit the certainties of future and furthers the perception that things aren’t quite the same anymore. So much for the lessons of my youth that once spoke of a surety of workable lifetimes plus a pension fades as the corporate cut away for the leanness of times. Gone are those workplaces that guarantee a place for generations. One is forced to consider what may fall into place for awhile since no longer can one plan for fifty years. Now it’s a time for improvising since changes can occur quite often in one’s life instead of that once good place to settle. One could think one might get too old for adjustments but now survival demands newness no matter where one is at for the easy chair is no longer assured. One could point a finger since it is an ignorant habit nowadays and say it’s all the union’s fault. Too much greed and too much benefit make the American worker obsolete in the global villag...

All About Freelance Writing - Do you love to write? Do you have a knack for making words come alive on a page? You may want to consider freelance writing as a way to make a good living from home.  Freelance writers write anything from newspaper columns to web content and even ebooks.  Getting Started Before you go looking for freelance jobs, you should build up a portfolio of articles. You can write for your own website or blog, offer to write free articles for friends, or contact your local paper about writing a column for them. Work on some articles that you can use as samples of your work and build a list of references for your potential clients to contact.  Where To Find Work The next step will be finding potential clients. You can visit some of the big freelance sites like elance and bid on projects. It is also a good idea to set up a website that showcases some of your writing, tells a little about you and your area of expertise, and of course you will have your co...

Action. Ideas. Motivation - In the introduction of Financial Dignity I refer to my age at the time and recall quite clearly when I realised I was 3 years older than when I had first started writing the book, but it was still nowhere near finished. I shudder to think that those 3 years had crept up on me so swiftly. The inexorable movement of time had caught me out while I was looking the other way and I had wasted so much of it. Then it had dawned on me why I had not finished the book I had started to so long ago. I knew I was not lazy and worked hard and enthusiastically when motivated. The mistake I had made was waiting for the motivation to happen. The Motivation Cycle I thought  Well if I only work on this thing while I feel like it will take for ever . I was stunned and demoralised and that nearly ended book writing for me. Without the stimulating  high  of motivation the task was just to enormous. Give up! Give up! Pestered the little voice in my head. I think it i...

About Writing: Just Get Started ! - I rarely suffer from what writer’s complain about the most and that is: writer’s block. Oh, sure, if I must write on a subject that I am not familiar with, then a certain amount of trepidation and the occasional blankness will set in. Still, if I accept a project I do so believing that I know enough about the topic to produce a compelling piece. Writing isn’t difficult for most accomplished writers, but you must get started. Here are some things that help get me going: If I am stuck, I write some sort of outline. Okay, maybe not a formal outline but something containing a topic sentence; 2, 3, or 4 main points; followed by a conclusion. As you can read there are three parts to any article: an introduction, the body, and a conclusion. Sometimes certain parts of the article I have more to write about than others. For example, I may have my main points for the body, but I don’t have the introductory part down just yet. No matter, I keep working on my ou...

A Writer’s Life For Me ? - It may be the hope of all who have ever put pen to paper that they might be able to write on a full-time basis. The romantic notion of a writer's life is compelling enough to many to find them seeking ways to make a living by crafting the written word. David Boles is the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Go Inside Magazine. Boles indicates his day starts at 8:00 a.m. and he rarely finishes writing until midnight. Boles has additional words of wisdom for new writers. 1. You will not get rich overnight Some of Boles' advice runs counter to the idealistic notion of what a writer's life is supposed to be, "The best thing you can do to prepare yourself for the life of a writer is to make certain you have a steady form of income that will cover your monthly nut." 2. Creativity may be overrated Boles also indicates creativity is less about devising something altogether new and more about a willingness to find new ingredients for an old recipe, ...

A Writer’s Guide To Finding Freelance Writing Jobs - Writers are very much in demand these days because of the rising demands for their online content. The pay is oftentimes better and the hours are not so long. Many even freelance full-time.  Freelance writing extends to several different categories. Before you begin looking for work, you’ll have to decide whether or not you want to get credit for your writing. If you insist on a byline, you may have difficulty finding a lot of paying jobs. Byline jobs are out there if you look. However, the most money to be made is from working as a web ghostwriter. There are several different categories of freelance writing. When you see the term “content writing” you will normally be providing text for an existing or new website. Your writing will have to be engaging and clear for website visitors. Article writers concentrate on providing articles for websites, newsletters and blogs. Generally, articles for the web are between 400 and 800 word...

A Work In Context - The Paradigm - A paradigm has been described as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.” Each writer comes at their work with a certain paradigm at work. Each writer will write with a set of assumptions about the world around them, they will subconsciously include concepts and values they find imperative. In the broadest perspective possible each writer will express their worldview in some form or fashion through what they write. This may not happen in every piece, however when the entire body of work is evaluated carefully it becomes clear what the author truly believes to be true, noble and right. In the realm of writing this concept is known as Context. This means that the author of any work lodges certain absolutes in virtually all areas of story construction. The story may include the writer’s philosophy of politics or their view of religion. A strong example of this w...

A Simple Formula For Writing Articles With A Minimal Amount Of Time And Effort - As a writer you may have ever felt overwhelmed by a blank sensation when trying to write an article. To eliminate the problem you may try to follow the tips in this article. Ok, let's start it. I don't want to waste your invaluable time. First, if you have a collection of private label contents, take a look at them. Try to find an article that covers similar subject with the article you want to write. For example if you want to write an article about badminton you can look for an article about tennis. Both have many similarities. They are games that require racket and net to play. In addition they can be played single or double. Just change the word "tennis" to "badminton" and change any inappropriate words. For example you may have to change the word "tennis ball" to "shuttlecock". Another example is if you want to create an article about restaurants in you...

A Secret To Getting Published - When Warner Books, one of the world's largest publishing companies, published my first book, The Angry Clam, back in 1998, the most common question I was asked was, "What were you smoking when you wrote this book?" This was quickly followed by the second most common question, "How in the world did a 40-page, hand-written book with bad drawings of a clam get published?" The answer to the first question was easy - pure Turkish Hashish - just kidding. (Actually, I awoke in the middle of the night with the idea of a ticked off clam running through my head, then feverishly spent the wee hours putting a frantic pencil to paper.) The answer to the second question takes a little bit more explaining but I believe it contains one of the essential keys (and secrets) to getting published. The story of how I got The Angry Clam published is a brief one so I will share it with you now: After I awoke from my long morning nap after having spent t...

A Powerful Yet Simple Strategy To Increase The Sales Of Your Book Ten-fold! - As a successful author interested in building a business off your book, you must understand the difference between features and benefits. Features are tangible and benefits are intangible.  Features describe what a product is or has based on physical/tangible characteristics. On the other hand, benefits are feeling oriented.  Remember that the reason that people come to the Internet is because they have wants and desires and want to be satisfied. This is the *sole* reason that people come to the Internet. The key for you is to market to people's problems and present yourself as the only credible solution.  Once you know your market's problems, you will create a list of benefits that they will experience from dealing with you. You want to distill this list of benefits down to their very essence, which gives you your key benefit. You do this by playing the Which Means What? game with yourself (ch...

A Man Writing Love Stories In A Woman's Publishing World- My publishing journey has been unusual enough that friends and publicists alike have suggested I write about it, especially the part about being a man writing love stories in a woman's genre. But it's not just the genre. The whole publishing and agency world I encountered was dominated by women. Sound interesting enough? Okay. There's just one little hitch. Now that I'm sitting in front of the keyboard, I find that there's not much to tell that's dramatic. Most of the women editors treated me fairly, and I worked well with the ones who gave me room to turn in.  If anything, being a man may have given me a certain advantage, you know, from a novelty standpoint. Not only was I a male engineer (of all things!), with no detectable writing credentials, daring to show up with a love story, but I was touting it as a love story unlike any other, one written of love at a higher level. Well, at least it made t...

A Geek Groundswell - One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot to do, but I didn't want to do any of it), I decided to play the Google game. This is the one where you input your own name or something else into the field in quotes to see how many search results you get. Because my most recent book, Queen Geeks in Love, was coming out soon, I decided to search the term "geek." What I found astounded me. I got more nearly 70 million hits from the word "geek." That's million. So, I figured that most every term would fetch that many results, or close to it. I started with what I would assume is the antithesis of 'geek': the "gossip girl', which yielded 3,560,000. 'Beauty Queen" yielded 1,750.000. Glamour came the closest to geek, with 44,600,000, but as you can plainly see, being glamorous is nothing compared to being geeky, statistically. Even the trendy "fashionista" only turned back 5,590,000 results. So...

A Freelancer's Guide To Meeting Project Deadlines - When it comes to meeting deadlines, one way to manage your timetable effectively is to divide the large jobs and farm them out to several freelancers. Let’s say you’ve been awarded a writing job to write an e-book on childcare with 10 chapters for $2,000 over a 45 day period of time. Bid out each chapter separately among 10 freelancers and allocate, say, $100 for each chapter over a 25 day period. This way you don’t have to worry about the deadline because you’ve given yourself a 20-day buffer and you stand to earn $1,000 for your efforts. If you are going to handle a project in this manner, then you must be able to rewrite the articles to make sure the entire book “flows” seamlessly and that the same style and tone of voice is consistent throughout. 1. Cultivate a strong talent pool In many cases, this is the most important asset you need to subcontract work to others. Here are a few additional tips to help you out in this regar...

A Few Dilemmas Of The Writing Journey - Being an unpublished novelist poses all sorts of dilemmas. Writing is entrepreneurial in nature, more than most people realize, and it is fraught with make or break decisions. Which side of the political spectrum do you show yourself?  Do you embellish this or that social issue, perhaps the one most fashionable, or do you hide from them all? If your goal is publication for its own sake, and you've decided to write, say, Gothic romance number 214,386, then you do need to follow the Gothic template. But you also need to make it stand out from most of the 214,385 Gothics that came before. The burden to distinguish is higher for unpublished writers because they have no track record to give their work advanced credibility or benefit of the doubt. Yet if the novice distinguishes herself too well, then her originality may be viewed as too risky in itself. This need to balance risks even extends to things that look simple and straightforward on pape...

A Different Way To Write Your First Novel - If you’ve always wanted to write a novel, but found the traditional structured process too frightening or overwhelming, maybe your imagination works in a more organic fashion like mine. In that case, start with your main character and the idea the character gives you for the plot. Then close your eyes, grab your notebook or computer, and watch the main character. Sooner or later she or he will begin talking and moving around. When that happens, start writing! I guarantee what you hear and see will thoroughly surprise and delight you. Even though my books are considered literary novels, I’ve always admired the mysteries of Tony Hillerman, and the way he laces his novels with information about the Native American tribes in his area. I call books like these “info novels,” and they are great fun if you’ve never read one. That is also a goal I try to achieve with my Occult novels. With these I’ve been able to weave information about contemporary ...

A Dating Story From My Youth  - Matt Matcherson is a writer musician and humorist. Sometimes he even writes funny music. His site MatchTales brings dating stories, site reviews and free dating support forums to the web. One of my first "Big Dates" was a Cotillion dance in 8th grade...or was it seventh? Cotillion was an attempt by a local "grande dame" to nurture refined manners in a group of young teens along with ballroom dancing instruction. I think it was a truly nerve wracking experience for most of us! Once a week we would walk a couple blocks from the middle school to the K of C Hall located on the 3rd floor of a downtown building. A virtual skyscraper in our town! Guys wanting a little money would hang about by the door and help the instructor out of her car ...open the door. These kind of brownie points paid a couple bucks cash! If you were really good you would carry some of her stuff up the 3 flights of worn wooden stairs. It was one of those buildings tha...

A Conversation With Helen Barer Author Of Fitness Kills - Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of http://Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Helen Barer author of Fitness Kills. Helen is a native New Yorker and has spent many years as a writer of non-fiction ranging from cookbooks to television documentaries. Norm: Good day Helen and thanks for participating in our interview. Helen: I'm delighted to have been invited. Norm: How did you happen to write a book about a fitness ranch in Baja and could you also tell us a bit about Fitness Kills? Helen: I'm a big fan of fitness spas - I've been going to one or another for more than 20 years. About 12 years ago, while struggling through an aerobics class at a spa in Baja California, I looked around and thought it was like being on a cruise ship. We'd all arrived on a Saturday, would leave the following Saturday, and in the meantime got to be  intimate acquaintances.' Fitness Kills is the story of Nor...

A Beginner's Guide to Writing a Novel  - No one is born a novel writer. But do you believe that we all have the capability to be writers? Impossible as it may seem but the answer is yes! If we have the passion for it and if we strive to make it happen, novelwriting can be as easy as writing ABC. Writing is actually not a very complicated thing. It is just like drawing, painting, and even cooking. It is an art! Your imagination is all that it takes to get it started. What makes it hard is not writing itself but how people make it hard than it really is. The first key to writing a novel is the ability to dream and imagine. Think back to when you were a little child and dreamed. Your imagination took you to places you've never been before. It made you do things you never thought you could do. Having superpowers...being in strange places...the conditions are limitless. Writing a novel is actually imagination translated into words. You close your eyes and let your thoughts drift whi...

A Bad Literary Agent Can Be Worse Than No Agent At All . Types of things to watch out for with agents: * Charging the author a fee up front, to be accepted as a client. Can be called a reading fee, or a monthly "office expenses" charge. The best agents, and most successful ones, only charge a percentage fee of royalties the author earns, typically 15%. Suppose a realtor charged you a fee to come over and tour your house before getting the listing? How quickly would you show that realtor the door. . . * Charging back unusually large "postage and copying fees" to send out an authors' work. One crooked agency accepts almost every client that contacts them, but in the fine print of the contract they charge "postage and handling" of up to $10 per submission they send out on your behalf. It doesn't cost $10 to send a letter and a sample chapter of a book to a publisher. This company makes a fortune from these fees whether or not they actually successfull...

25 Ways To Fail As A Freelance Writer 1.  Don’t set yourself a writing routine or stick to it. 2.  Always make sure that doing your writing is at the bottom of your list of priorities, and even when you are writing, if something else you have to do that day springs to mind, then go and do that instead. 3.  If one of your friends comes round to invite you out for coffee, just go, no matter how busy you are with your writing. 4.  Whenever you’re writing, answer the phone every time it rings and answer the door every time someone knocks. 5.  Always feel guilty for doing your writing instead of doing what other people want you to do. 6.  Don’t read any articles about writing, especially if it’s written by an expert. 7.  If anyone ever tells you of a simple and profitable way to make money from your writing, don’t believe them and never try it. 8.  Never take a writing course to hone your skills. 9.  Don’t visit any writing sites on the internet, ...

12 Tips For Generating Bright Ideas For Writing - Are you running short of ideas for your blogs or articles? Is generating fresh ideas for writing becoming difficult? By following the techniques discussed in this article, you will be a writing power house.  1. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system.  Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google's RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.  2. Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.  3. Use a PDA and ca...

10 Tips for Tech-Writers - Tech-writing is a tricky business. It’s not a very high profile industry, so there’s not much support around. Follow these 10 quick tips, and you’ll be well on your way to a satisfying tech-writing career. 1) Follow a sensible career path… STEP 1: Start in a team STEP 2: Stay only just long enough STEP 3: Manage yourself STEP 4: Manage a team STEP 5: Go contracting (depends on the market)  2) Knowledge is your lifeblood – learn the politics of your company. Know who knows what. Find someone who consistently gives you timely, reliable, technically accurate answers, and get their name tattooed on your shoulder! Every company has at least one. And they may not be in the project manager/product manager/customer/programmer roles. They are generally the people who’ve used the product in the real world, and dealt with real world customers.  3) Communicate WITH, not AT. Tech-writers don’t have enough power to get away with communicating at.  4) Track s...

10 Smart Moves For Getting Published In Top Magazines - Eager to see your byline in magazines like Smithsonian, National Geographic, Parade or Outside?  Here are 10 tips on getting past the threshold of "Maybe" to "Yes" at top magazines. 1.  Put timing on your side.  You can change a perennial story, where there's no special reason to do it now rather than next year, to one that prompts an immediate assignment by adding a connection to some upcoming season or event.  For instance, "the disposable versus cloth diaper debate" lacks any time element.  But you can peg it to Earth Day, coming up in April, or specific future environmental powwows.  You can get the same effect by tying a perennial topic to recent front-page news.  If devastating floods are lingering in North Carolina, use that to make a piece on adequately insuring a business sound timely. 2.  Freshen up perennial topics. Some magazines revisit the same topics again and again because re...

10 Resume writing tips to land you your dream job - Imagine yourself sitting in an employer's desk with hundreds of resumes falling in on your desk against a vacancy declared by you in your company.  Number of vacancy - 1, and number of applicants - innumerable.  As an employer it is your responsibility to select the most deserving, suitable and competent candidate. So it is up to the candidate to snatch the employer's attention out of those hundreds of resume application. As such, writing a resume is all about knowing what employers specifically look for in an applicant's application. So, never make the mistake of underestimating the importance of a "good and eye-catching resume". Now, a good and a perfect resume is not an allegory. Neither has it anything to do with the elite schools or exceptional work experience. A blue collar worker may have a exceptional CV, while the resume of a white collar professional may have a poorly written one. A good resume is your...