The Struggling Writer

The chronicles of a freelance writer as he tries to make a living.

Friday, November 10, 2006

The end of a busy non-writing week

It's been a busy week for me. I had jury duty and my usual stuff with my niece so I'm a bit behind. I should have five articles up at LTK Business by now but I have only three. I plan to get caught up by Sunday.

Learning Through History is a bi-monthly magazine for children aged 9-16. They just put out a request for articles for their next two issues and I want to submit something to them for each issue. Those probably requires a little book work rather than just the usual Internet research I do, so that would be a good thing to do over Thanksgiving week when my Internet access will be limited.

My previously stated goal of "do something every day" isn't working out this month. I think it's a good goal, but it's also good to know when to let things go. I imagine things won't settle until January so now it is more a matter of "do something when I can". I will definitely make my goal of "more money this month than last month" and I stand a good chance of meeting my secondary goal of "make twice as much money this month as last month". That more money goal should be "submit a greater value of articles this month than last month" so I'm not held hostage to someone else's payment schedule. If an article gets rejected, it still counts toward the goal of submission. I also keep track of acceptance and payment separately just because I'm a statistics nerd.

One comment about LTK over How To Do Things is that I certainly get more editing feedback. HTDT has asked for only minor changes to a couple of articles. Betsy, my editor at LTK, always finds a number of corrections that improve the flow of the article. She mentioned that I use the word "will" too much. I thought that was silly until I searched for the word in one of my articles. Yikes! She fixed several examples and the text reads better. I'm still trying hard to balance time spend vs. money earned over there but it's certainly a better learning environment than HTDT and that's valuable.

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