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“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon . . . My goodness how the time has flewn.” (Dr. Seuss). For years, this was my reaction after realizing that I have missed – again! –  the pitching deadlines for seasonal and thematic articles. But not anymore. I found a simple solution to facilitate my freelance writer’s life – a  personal writing calendar. This time-tracking tool helped me to organize my activities and increase my earnings. Let me share how a personal writing calendar can help you, too. Submit in advance time-sensitive pitches and manuscripts Many editors need submissions related to holidays and anniversaries. Knowing in advance about upcoming events gives you a competitive edge in pitching. I use these resources: 2026 Anniversaries and Commemorations Awareness Days & Events Historical Anniversaries  Holidays and Observances around the World Break into new publications by using editorial calendars Editorial calendars contain themes and deadlines for upcoming issues. The link to the editorial calendar can often be found in the advertisement section. By studying editorial calendars before pitching, you can tailor your queries to meet editors’ needs. That’s how I broke into Creation Illustrated and got my first byline! I use More

I have been asked a few times of late about whether a writer should hire an editor before pitching to an editor or agent. After all, if those gatekeepers love the idea, won’t they provide an editor to clean it up? 1) Editors cost money. If they receive a manuscript with a great idea that ALSO is clean, well-written, and clearly comfortable with grammar, don’t you think they’ll go for that one over one with just a great idea? The less they have to beat up a manuscript, the easier an author is to work with, the more attractive the deal. 2) Clean manuscripts demonstrate dedication. A good idea in a clean manuscript that the author put a great deal of effort into presenting makes a grand impact on agents and publishers. 3) Clean manuscripts underline talent. Don’t send a manuscript and expect them to look through errors or rough patches to find the magic. The patches will win every time. A clean and edited manuscript allows the agents or publisher to just read the story and grasp the brilliance without being distracted. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good writing of good ideas not so much. Be the cream that rises More

I read the best essay about writing today from a writer named Angela Yuriko Smith who manages the Substack page and newsletter called Authortunities. She’s pretty cool and has some great ideas. We don’t agree on everything, but I love how she justifies her thoughts. She’s smart and she loves helping writers. Today she spoke of Protecting Your Lightning. In essence, we are surrounded by distractions. Phones, family, social media, etc. Worse, everyone has an urgency to them, thinking that since life is faster, that responses ought to be quick all around. That includes demands on you. “Our attention is a commodity,” she says, and she isn’t wrong. There’s lots of good metaphors and comparisons in the piece, but my favorite was the intentional vs. gravitational way we deal with it all. Having information at our fingertips is great. . . when we need it. But when we just scroll for the sake of scrolling, a lot doesn’t get done. . . like writing. And it stifles our creativity and productivity. Develop habits and be religious about maintaining them. Stick to what you sat down at the keyboard to do. . . or shut down the social media to put your butt in the chair More

Writing is a primary source of income that should be stored in more than one location. When you don’t do this and your hardware crashes, you risk missed deadlines, kill fees, and strained client relationships. In addition, you feel frustrated and angry as you try to duplicate what was lost from memory or notes. As a longtime technical/creative writer, I regularly work with backups and archives. I understand the cost of losing your important information without a second copy. In the end, even one day of lost productivity can exceed a year of a basic subscription for backup storage. Why You Don’t Back Up Your Work Developing reasons not to save data beyond your device is a creative endeavor in itself. One cause given is that your material has a greater chance of being stolen from a cloud storage platform. In other situations, your overconfidence exceeds the hardware’s actual staying power. Then there’s procrastination. “I’ll get to it soon” never materializes when it comes to securing your work. As a result, you might be too late to do anything if your device won’t boot up. Back Up Now for Safety Later It takes around 20 minutes to add your data More

In a recent chatroom, someone asked if there was any hope left for struggling writers with so many other writers taking shortcuts with AI. My response was that if fear of AI knocks you off your game, maybe you aren’t playing the right game. Many of us live in fear that we aren’t being productive with our writing. We aren’t publishing enough, marketing enough, or selling enough. There are plenty of other ways to make money in this world, and writing is not at the forefront of those opportunities. Writing is a love dance with words. If you start with a story to tell, it’s still about dancing with words. If you have strong journalism skills, it’s still about dancing with words. If you need to make money to prove you are a writer, it’s still about dancing with words. For a moment, toss the concept of being professional, making money, or becoming well known. When writing feels inherent… When writing gives you solace… When writing transports you to a better place… When writing allows you to give yourself grace and not compete… When writing isn’t about legacy, career, or proving a point… That’s loving yourself. That’s appreciating yourself. That’s More

I declined a speaking opportunity this week. One in a very reasonable distance from me, as a matter of fact. This time of year often fills my calendar with such requests, which thrills me. I love doing events. But they must be worth my investment of time, travel, and book sales. In this case, it was a writers thing. I won’t say which one. Doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. Their conditions and mine just didn’t meet in the middle and we parted ways amicably. We all have budgets. But, that said, my fee is not high, and oftentimes, the fact I am on the SC Humanities Speakers Roster would have covered my speaking fee. But the travel and hotel were not covered, and sales would be minimal. Writers don’t make money selling books to other writers. Some will say I can afford to turn down an event at this stage in my career, but in actuality, I could not afford to accept it. I would have declined early in my career as well. Events consisting of all writers do not result in big book sales. Most writers there are trying to sell a book. Your exposure is minimal. The More

Many freelancers struggle with consistency, especially with pitching and idea generation. We all know we should keep a pitch tracker so we’ll know when we’ve sent something out and when we can expect a response. But if that’s all we’re doing, it’s easy to lose focus. Most of us are goal-oriented or reward-oriented. We like knowing there’s something waiting for us at the end of our hard work. We don’t always get responses fast enough to fill that need. What can help is a seven-step system that will keep the ideas flowing and make a writer look forward to writing. 1.    Start by creating a weekly goal tracker to keep ideas and outreach on track. It can look something like this: Task / Minimum Goal  / Stretch Goal New article ideas      5   /   10 Pitches sent      2  /   5 Follow-ups on previous pitches     2  /   3 Articles drafted or revised     1  /   2 2.    At the end of every week, have a creative check-in. I usually do this every Friday evening. See how many new ideas you came up with, how many pitches you sent, if any follow-ups are due in the coming week, and if there are any ideas you could refine or match to a different editor, More

I just spent a week going back and forth with a freelance writer who wanted to see his piece published in this newsletter. TO be honest, the piece had great potential. I needed some changes in it, and he quickly accommodated. The message had purpose. I hadn’t had red flags before then, but while he did a rewrite, I did a deep dive into him to see if he might be in any way affiliated with AI or a con artist from a third world country. I get a ton of both. I had hope for this piece, but my gut told me to look harder after I studied his resume…then his email. Three different emails with all of them Gmail, and two of them with names I could not read much less pronounce. Every single link in his bio led to places I’d never heard of before except one, LinkedIn. Then I looked at where he claimed to be from, and it ranged from West Virginia to California to UK to Asia. His resume was posted with a company that blatantly promoted itself as AI-friendly. He had no presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, etc. When I questioned him More

Strong submission guidelines are the cornerstone of being a published author. If you know which publications are receptive and paying, you’re ahead of the writing race. However, good guidelines can be difficult to source, and they’re individual to every author. Here’s how to sift through the pile and find the golden guidelines. Searching for Pages and Guidelines Search for guidelines using different engines: DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google can each produce individual results.  I sold “Ouij-e: Summoning Spirits Online” to Fate & Fortune Magazine – but only after switching to DuckDuckGo for my searches. Bonus tip: turn off AI Search and Personalized Results via search engine settings, or use incognito mode. Add keywords to your search matching your niche (e.g. “submission guidelines technology” or “write for us music magazine”) and add keywords like “pay” or “rate” to look for ones more likely to list their pay. Searching for niche “pagan” markets connected me to The Wild Hunt’s guidelines, and I sold “Are Massive Multiplayer Online Rituals the Future?” and soon after submitted my first piece to the quarterly Witches Magazine. Markets that don’t list their requirements are much more likely to say: “We have no need for writers,” or “We don’t have a writing budget.” Public guidelines and “write for us” pages More

Writers look at contests for entry fee, word count, prize money, potential publication, and which influential judge might be on board to read the entries. But what is also important to note is the rights you give up if you win. . . or maybe even if you just enter.   Begin with understanding why an entity is even running the contest. What is the motive? Such motives can be:   1) To make money with entry fees. Often the fees tally higher than the prize money and expenses, giving the sponsor a profit. It’s how many literary journals stay afloat.   2) To draw attention to other products. Entities might need members, or wish to sell tickets to courses or classes or editing services, or hope to draw attention to a book or two, and a contest is free advertising to the rest of the entity’s assets.   3) To gather assets in the form of all these stories, poems, or prose and use them to populate a website, publish an anthology, or gain a connection to writers’ brands for future use. (i.e., We’ve had successful authors like John Doe participate in our contests.)   There is nothing illegal More