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If you freelance, you know the really bad clients: the ones who don’t pay, the ones who want free work, the ones who don’t want to pay by a lesser order of magnitude of what your work is worth, the ones who want you to prioritize their work in front of other clients (without paying […]

I have an ugly question that’s not terribly hypothetical.  Ugly because it will require some writers to a) change their minds, or b) fail. Because the question precludes the magical talent fairy:  “I just want to write,” which means, “I’m so good that my marketing/promotions basically takes care of itself.”  Nice gig if you can

I think I’ve found an answer (for now) for the pair of questions that’s been bothering me over the last year.  I’ve been chipping away at both of them; depression worked itself loose much more easily than anxiety. The questions: What to do/take advantage of when I’m depressed? (What is the min/max approach to dealing

So I have enough confidence in  my stories now that I feel like it’s “okay” to market and promote them.  (For some reason, I got over the hangup of publishing them long ago.)  I’m learning that with marketing the stories, it’s useful to make sure that they a) have a current, defined market, and b) the cover,

One type of vicious circle is when you can’t do X unless you first do Y, but in order to do Y, you have to first do X.  Which is impossible. And yet anyone who figures out a way to do X is bootstrapping.  Which is admirable.  On a computer, the process of booting is

Dilemmas usually defined as when you have to decide between two impossible choices.  Mine are almost always between “I can’t do this” and “I must do this.” Some options: Avoid the situation (and thus cognitive dissonance related to it), but incur a heavy personal cost of lost or damaged trust and relationships.  Ghosting. Tell the

That grid that has “urgent” along one axis and “important” along the other axis (the Eisenhower Principle) is driven by fear.  It takes an overwhelming mass of all the things and turns them into “yes, but these two things are the only ones you actually need to panic about today.” The problem is, what do you do

Most of us don’t have conscious end-goals for our lives.  We don’t have principles that we can state.  We don’t know ourselves all that well.  Sometimes we think we have these things and we don’t:  the things we deeply, truly believe in are often beyond our grasp. So maybe starting off with long-term planning as

Marketing:  how much effort does this technique take; how durable is the effect of the technique; what is the impact of the technique?  Three axes for a graph: effort, durability, impact. A book review is high effort, high durability, high impact.  A single tweet is low effort, low durability, low impact.  A well-coordinated social media

I’m used to defining the story of a life.  Not with each character I create, but with each book.  There’s one main character; the entire book becomes a kind of exoskeleton for the character within.  The other characters are reactions, motifs, variations, opinions–all of them filtered and refiltered through the main character’s perspective.  If I