A few weeks ago I wrote about writing articles in Excel. But one of the hiccups I encountered was tracking word count in Excel — which is pretty technical! Here’s an easy way to do it.

Monday night I attended a panel given by a Boston-area writing group. My own writing group is coming up on our one year anniversary, so here are some take-aways from their talk, and from my experience.

“Once upon a time…” A great storytelling framework for your writing is the Hero’s Journey. Let’s go over its steps, and where you’ll recognize it in the stories around you.

Want a way to truly get to know your characters? Pick a Myers-Briggs personality for them.

If you’re a freelance writer, you’ll probably need to do an interview or two or a dozen in your time, whether you’re writing a profile or feature on a person and their work, or simply need some experts for an article. Here’s my process for conducting an interview.

Take the anxiety out of writing — especially freelance writing, which is compounded by having to create great work for others — by simply pounding out a shitty first draft.

I’ve recently started using an approach to my writing that’s keeping everything much more organized, and makes the act of writing much less daunting. What is it? Writing in Excel.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Colson Whitehead, and recently read the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys, his newest novel. Read more about it, some of his other works that I love, and the unfortunate significance of reading The Nickel Boys this week.

Proofreading isn’t just a glance through before hitting publish. It’s a lot more intricate and nuanced than that, and today I share how I go about proofreading (since I’ve been actually getting paid to do it recently!). Ultimately? All those writing mechanics should disappear to create a seamless reading experience.

I’m back with a new Daily Freelancer, coming off of a busy week last week where I learned lots of things! Today, it’s all about thinking about the customer and how to connect to their identity when marketing your company — with a little help from Simon Sinek’s TED Talk.

I reread Leading Men last week for a book club, and it was one of my favorite novels of 2019. Read about what a beautiful, stylistically written book it is, full of longing and desire.

Today, I changed one of my rates. Here’s what happened.

It was an up-and-down day, with successes and rejections. I borrow some principles from meditation and mindfulness to look at how we can rise above the emotions of being a writer.

Writers aren’t perfect…but kinda have to be perfect when they write (so says I, who found a typo in my Upwork profile this past weekend). Since I’ve been going overboard on proofreading today, here are some quick tips on how to get rid of those last-minute typos.

While SEO might be a great framework, and a way to crack the formula of Google rankings, there’s something at the core of good content that we never talk about: emotion. Today I talk about how to craft great content by focusing on writing techniques.

As a writer, ideas are our gas. Learn how to fill the tank with some of these suggestions.

Do you dread hitting publish? Are you constantly rereading your work because you’re terrified of a typo? Here are some tips on how I got over my mindset of “perfect” in order to produce content that’s “good.”

Since I sent some pitches out today, for different types of work, I talk about the myth of the perfect pitch. I do list some of the basics you need to cover to make sure you’re coming across as human.