Natalia M. Sylvester

There’s an old episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie is called in for jury duty and tries getting out of it by saying something like: “See, I work for myself, and if I don’t come in to work one day, there’s no one to cover for me.”

I’m reminded of this every time I get ready for a vacation. When a freelancer leaves the office there is no alternative contact to include in your Autoreply emails; there’s no one you can leave an unfinished project with to finalize the last details. And even though I CAN take my work with me wherever I go, the point of a vacation is to unplug a bit, right? Since I’ll be skipping town for a few days over the upcoming holiday weekend, I thought I’d share how I prepare to leave my office unmanned. It’s kind of like those wedding to-do lists you’ll find in magazines.

1 to 2 months before the big day: The first step is to determine just how unplugged you’re going to be while you’re out. For the purposes of this trip, I’m okay with receiving emails on my phone, but realistically I know I won’t have time to write. So as new work comes in, I make sure to schedule all deadlines for the week before I leave or a couple of weeks after I return. Personally, I prefer to have as much done as possible before I leave, so that I can really unwind and not worry about all the unfinished business I have to take care of the second I return. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll keep this short because it’s Friday and I like to start winding down on Friday. What I mean by this is that I set aside Fridays to do work that doesn’t feel as much like work.

Today, for example, I have a networking lunch, which is nice because I’ve noticed that people are usually a little more relaxed and social with the weekend approaching. Networking has become a huge part of my work, but it doesn’t feel like work at all. I get out of the house, meet some great people and get my name out there so that I’m not working in a vacuum (which, admittedly, I did do for a while when I first started freelancing, when my shyness just got the better  of me).

Other things I set aside for Fridays are small things that just have to be done, like if I need to update my profile on LinkedIn, upload a new picture onto Gravatar (which is the plan for next Friday, since I’m waiting on my pictures) or tweak my resume to reflect my latest work. I brainstorm ideas for new work. I let my curiosity loose and indulge in some aimless web surfing for an hour or so to see where it takes me. And I read. A lot. I read blogs and websites I’ve been meaning to read all week, I read magazines that have arrived in my mailbox and books that are just so well-written they make me want to write. I love that reading is such an important part of my job.

What about you?  Do you wind down on Fridays?

There’s been quite a discussion over at FreelanceFolder about vampire clients who suck the life out of a freelancer’s business. It’s a subject that touched a lot of nerves because most freelancers have dealt with clients like these before–they may be extremely demanding, not at all sure of what they want, or they’re constantly changing the direction of the project.

The truth is that I’ve been there before. I can understand the need to vent (and I vented myself, because it’s a very real problem in our line of work). But then I realized on the flip side of things, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really amazing clients who are a freelancer’s dream. I think they deserve a little recognition in the blogosphere, too, and maybe in the process it’ll help some potential vampire clients out there get a better idea of what to expect when they work with a freelancer. Because more often than not, vamp clients are usually those that have never worked with a freelancer before. They might be used to micromanaging, or they’re unfamiliar with the idea that a freelancer is an independent worker who isn’t working exclusively for them.

But then there are those clients who just get it. They’re the ones you want to hold on to, the ones you want to work with over and over again. When I think of my favorite clients, they all have these qualities in common: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week on Nathan Bransford’s blog, he wrote about how his preferred method of e-reading is, surprisingly, on the iPhone. When it comes to eBooks I’ve been kind of like a child who wants to walk over a frozen pond but worries he’ll fall through the ice: I’m curious about it, sure, but there’s a little voice in the back of my mind that hesitates, that’s all uppity,  yelling “you can’t be a real bookworm if you’ve got no books on your shelf!”

So I read Nathan’s post and went to bed that night with my flimsy, paperback, pages you can smell, copy of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. My husband was lying next to me with his G1 phone, reading what I assumed were a quick couple of emails or Twitter updates before bed. Twenty minutes passed and I noticed he was still reading, so I asked him what he was doing.

“Just reading some articles,” he said.

There, in our bed, was our own microcosm of the whole traditional vs. digital reading debate. Read the rest of this entry »

Meeting publishing pros at writers conferences is something that can’t be duplicated no matter how many agent blogs and tweets you follow, so imagine my excitement when agent Colleen Lindsay posted a contest on her blog, The Swivet, for a scholarship to the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar in NYC! It’s a chance to have your query letter and first two pages of your manuscript read and critiqued by agents and editors! Sign me up! Right now!

Right?

Maybe not so fast. All excitement put aside, I know my manuscript just isn’t ready yet. I’m still in the revision stages, and you know rule number one about querying: Don’t do it too early. This also happens to be one of the rules in the contest (only finished novels!), which confirms my suspicions that these contests are plagued with premature works constantly.

Putting your work in front of an agent before it’s as close to perfect as it’ll ever be is kind of like an actor stepping onto the red carpet without their best outfit on. You can’t risk making a bad impression, unless you want to be the literary equivalent of Bjork’s swan dress:

Source: Marie Claire's The Oscars Best and Worst Dressed List

That was 2001, by the way, and we STILL haven’t forgotten it, because poor choices in how you present yourself and your work leave an impression ten times more easily than good ones will. Most literary agents agree that if they’ve turned a work down once they won’t reconsider re-reading even if you’ve revised. Even if you’ve taken off that swan dress and slipped into Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace.

Of course, if you’ve got your query letter and manuscript ready to go then by all means you should enter the contest, and any other contests that pop up occasionally on the publishing blogs that I’m always tempted to enter before I slap myself on the wrist and say: “One day, oh impatient one, one day.”

If not, be a sponge in the meantime. Learn everything you can about the writing and querying process so that once you start it, you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. There will be plenty of other contests in the future, and the best time to enter isn’t now, but when your work is at its best.

The key to giving a great writing critique isn’t pointing out the problems in the work–it’s trying to figure out why they’re happening. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done when you’re dealing with something as fluid as writing.

It’s not like a math problem where you can trace a person’s steps and see where they put in the wrong number. If a character has no character, there’s usually no easy fix. And if the story is just coming off as boring, there’s no easy way to tell a writer that. So can there really be a formula for giving constructive criticism? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to vent about your work anxieties when there’s no watercooler in your home office, or when the only semblance of a co-worker at your job has four legs and doesn’t really talk much.

But recently I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several work-from-home freelancers and was so happy to hear I wasn’t alone in my pet peeves.  It’s true that we don’t deal with some of the more typical office problems like having a tough boss, clashing with co-workers, dealing with bad parking spots or disappearing red staplers (I love Office Space, can you tell?). But our unique working situations can lead to dilemmas that only other freelancers could understand. Here are just a few of mine:

People assume I’m not working since I work from home: It took some time and conditioning before family and friends got the hint that I can’t take personal calls at all hours of the day or hang out at their house to wait for a UPS delivery while they went to work. Just because we don’t have a typical 9-to-5 schedule doesn’t mean we don’t need time to work. A flexible schedule is not the same as an open schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

I often hear writers compare their book-in-progress to a baby, to a child they’ve conceived, carried and birthed after months (or years) of labor. They’ve suffered the sleepless nights of typing away at their computer or lying awake wondering what their character will do next, and by the time the first draft is complete they feel an attachment only a parent could for his child, full of unconditional love and pride.

This is where the book/baby metaphor can either go really wrong or really right. Because any parent knows that after you’ve given birth to a child comes the really hard part: raising it right. And after you’ve written that first draft of your novel you need to do the same: revise it right. Read the rest of this entry »

Circa 1995, I used to type stories and poems into Word Perfect and print them out on a ridiculously loud dot matrix printer. Every time I wanted to change fonts, there was the quick brown fox, jumping over the lazy dog:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was used to demonstrate different fonts because it’s a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters in the alphabet. It originated as a practice sentence for stenography books in the late 1800s.

Maybe it’s time for some updated material. Here’s my shot at coming up with an original pangram:

A fuzzy pig weeps quietly whenever men joke of bacon and taxes.

Care to give it a try?

This is a post mainly about freelancing but also a lot about my Boston Terrier, Maggie, who is just so cute that it was only a matter of time before I tried incorporating her into this blog. It’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but it’d make a great spin-off: Marley and Me for Freelancers. No? Not so much?

Anyways, Maggie seems to think she’s a person, like all dogs do, but I suspect that person could be a freelancer. In that case, here are a few lessons we could learn from her:

Don’t pounce too quickly: If the wind blows a leaf across her path Maggie will pounce on it, thinking it’s a lizard. Sometimes she’ll chase her own shadows. If she’d only take a second or two to take in the situation I’m sure she’d waste a lot less of her energy. Read the rest of this entry »