Setting Sail for a New Home!

Hey there! I am no longer here on Blogger! If you're looking for more of my work and want to follow along still, please head on over to my new website at: www.jtworld.net/

Dreaming of Dragons - Loving Our Writing

Last week I was driving to our local wal-mart with my 4-year old with me. We were having some daddy-son time by shopping for toys, getting groceries and getting his free pizza from Pizza Hut because of the reader program.

As I was driving, I glanced in the mirror and saw him staring out the window making facial expressions from epic to happy. I had the soundtrack of a Two Steps From Hell blaring and when I asked him what he was thinking about he answered, "Fighting dragons."

I think as writers, we sometimes forget to stop and enjoy our stories. I know for me, I can get obsessive about my story, making sure that it is working, the grammar is correct, and that there isn't an obvious error. The problem though is that I forget to stop and enjoy the story. If you aren't, you're missing a great part of the entire writing process.

We, as writers, have the power to create people, worlds, and adventures. We should take the time to enjoy the company of our characters and exploring the unknown with them. The time to worry about prose and grammar can come later.

I do not know about you but stories are something I cannot do without and I need to work on taking my time with them. I know that if I do, I can imbue it with more love and magic than I already am.

How about you? Do you enjoy your stories? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!

Are you Saying Women Can't Write?

Lately, with the Women's march and the strike wednesday when women did not come to work, I still cannot figure out how people who believe in either active or passive sexism think it makes sense.

What really crystalized this for me was reading a blog post about how quickly a woman's manuscript is rejected because it has her name on it. I don't know if it's because of misconception that women can't write certain genre's or that women "can't really write". Whatever you are thinking, it's bull.

I have read some amazing women writers and that they are forced to either publish under a pen name or use their initials to mask their gender is an insulting slight.

I will support women writers and I hope you will do to. All manuscripts and all books should be judged by their content, not by the gender of the writer.

Let's stop this crap and support our women writers in our community and make sure that the publishing industry know that they aren't going anywhere and they have the backing of an awesome writing community.

3 tips About Dealing with Criticism

I think one of the things that scares writers the most is criticism. I am not just referring to the constructive criticism we like to get but also that comment or complaint haunting our book's page.

Criticism can be both a blessing and a curse as it exposes your work from the vacuum of your own mind to the thoughts and ideas of the rest of the world.

The biggest reason that authors struggle with criticism is that our writing is an extension of ourselves and we have a tendency to take any positive or negative comment and apply it to ourselves.

Here are a few tips that could help you cope with feedback.

1) Though important, take feedback with a grain of salt. Everyone has their own opinion of writing just like art. If you feel the feedback is just taste, then you can safely move on.

2) If the feedback has points, consider them. Our profession is unending and we are always learning. Your commenter may have some valuable insight that you would have never considered.

3) Ignore the trolls. This is, after all, the internet. There are people who take great pleasure in attacking people for the sake of attacking. If their review is unfair and you can respond, do so in a calm manner. The response is not for the troll but for the future readers that might stumble on your work.

Above all, remember, if you like your work, that is the most important part. It is good to take your reader's thoughts in mind as they are paying customers in the indie world but the integrity of the work is yours.

Have any thoughts, comments or stories when it comes to feedback? Let me know if the comments below!

What I hated about Freelancing

It has been awhile since I released anything to my blog and that is because I have been blessed with a career change that was not so draining upon my ability to think. After spending six months in total as a freelancer, I have made quite a few discoveries that anyone thinking about the job should consider.

It sucks trying to hunt down new gigs

The hardest part and what I hated the most was hunting down gigs that I could apply for as many times the gigs out there are from people who do not understand how much an author really costs and so has high expectations for little to nothing in cost.

For every ten applications I submitted, maybe two or three would be nibbles and then one would be for sure but the problem was for every one job I picked up, two finished leaving me behind by one. As I was unemployed and doing this as a means to live, it was a challenge to get all the bills paid.

People demanding masterpieces for a Pittance

This irked me the most. Not because I was greedy and expected people to pay me a lot (as of 2016, the minimum a freelancer should expect is .02 cents per word or $10.00 for 500 words) but there were people contacting me who wanted a 50,000 word novel for only $100 dollars and a timeline of one week including second draft and editing.

Every time I said, “You do realize a good piece of work can take up to six months to write, especially when you are only providing me with a 50-word description of the entire story”. The usual response to this was both silence and a lost job or “We can find someone else if you don’t want it” which had me respond, “Go ahead and good luck getting anything decent.”

I can understand people who want to get a decent deal and are usually funding out of their own pocket but at some of the prices offered, it's downright robbery and an insult to a writer.

All the Extra Fees

As a beginner freelancer, I am forced to work on projects like freelancer.com or upwork.com and there they charge you a percentage of your income just for getting a job. A lot of these places even charge the client who is trying to hire and so both sides are losing money for the third party service. This, in itself, is not a bad thing because third party companies need money to keep going but it is very hard when you’re hired to write a 500-word article at $10.00 and have to give 20% of that to Upwork for their services. (Take a look at their sliding scale for more information).

The only place I ever found that never did that was writeraccess.com and as of 2017, I highly recommend them. They have a steep application that proves that you can write before letting you onto their program but they only charge the client and not the freelancer for work.

It’s great as a side business

Freelancing is fun, do not get me wrong. I just struggled with it as a full-time occupation and it gave me a lot of nights where I just stared at the ceiling trying to figure out what to do the next day. I still do it as a part-time hobby because I could never truly get out of that world but I know longer feel the need to apply to some job because I need the money they are offering.

So, if you are still considering getting into the world of freelancing, try to take these things to heart because at one point you will find yourself staring at the screen wondering a lot of these questions yourself.

What do you think? Did you have a good/bad experience or advice for others? Share it in the comments!