Natalia M. Sylvester

Lately I’ve had the urge to be a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire because of all the random facts I’ve learned from writing.

The number of miles a bee needs to fly to produce a pound of honey? 25,000. The inventor of the trapeze used in aerial dance? Terry Sendgraff. The two major types of stroke? Hemorrhagic and ischemic. That ought to get me at least $64,000, right? (Courtesy of a couple of feature articles and some marketing copy I wrote for a hospital.)

The funny thing with research is that if you do it right, you’ll do a whole lot of it, but not all of it will end up in your final copy. When asked to write about something you don’t know much about, the key isn’t to collect a ton of facts and later regurgitate them in your writing. Read the rest of this entry »

Today what’s on my mind is a bit of a shameless plug, but there’s a lesson here, I promise!

Here it is: NPR mentioned my essay on racism amongst Latinos, which I wrote for this month’s issue of Latina magazine, on yesterday’s “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin. The essay was born out of a pseudo-compliment I’ve received most of my life from other Latinos (listen for it at about the 5-minute mark).

The thing is, I never would’ve found out about this if it weren’t for my obsessive habit of Googling my name on an almost daily basis (admit it, you do it, too). Since I’m in the process of re-writing my site for SEO, I often check to see how it’s ranking (you’d be surprised how many Natalia Maldonado’s are out there). Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I hear most often when I tell people what I do (aside from the “who do you write for?” question) is “That’s great! You can work from anywhere!”

This is true only to a certain extent. If I move it probably won’t affect my work that much, but I’ve been guilty of going on trips and not taking my work with me as much as I should. And I don’t mean vacation trips. Last month I helped my sister move out of state and stayed at her house for about a week. I took my laptop and told myself I’d get lots of work done, but in the end all I really ended up doing was preparing my taxes for the second quarter estimates.

I guess I’m just a creature of habit. I don’t do the whole write-at-a-starbucks-coffee-shop thing. I tried working from a Panera once because they offered free wi-fi but felt guilted into buying a soup and salad. I need quiet, I need my desk, I need my piles of papers surrounding me.

But lately I feel the urge to get out the office and interact with actual humans. Read the rest of this entry »

My husband is switching careers into computer animation, and as a result of marital osmosis, (whatever information he absorbs trickles down to me in some affect), I’ve learned a lot about this field. Turns out, a lot of it can be applied to writing.

On a recent road trip, we listened to a 9-hour audiobook on the history of Pixar. While he was fascinated by the company’s humble beginnings in Silicon Valley and their limitless artistic vision, I jotted down notes of my own. True, some of us may have heard these lessons before, but there’s something about having a wooden toy doll illustrate a point that really hammered it all in for me. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m tempted to include the typewriter in the corner of my mom’s office as one of my first workspaces, but the keyword here is WORK, and I doubt a four-year-old writing limericks that rhymed with “Coke” really qualifies.

When I first started freelancing full-time, my office consisted of a shiny new Macbook and the dining room table of our one-bedroom apartment. At the end of each day, I had piles of papers, folders, notepads, envelopes and pens scattered across the table, and come dinnertime it all had to be transferred elsewhere. When we moved into a bigger one-bedroom apartment the living room had space in the corner for a small desk, so I switched headquarters. Only problem was, being in the same room as your kitchen, couch and television doesn’t make for the best work ethic.

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Not that I HAVE a young apprentice, but if I did, this is the advice I’d give her (while speaking like a master Jedi).

I didn’t learn this lesson in freelancing as early as I probably should have. The first article I ever sold was a classic example of beginner’s luck. I wrote an essay, emailed it to the editor and took a nap (these were my college days, after all). By the time I woke up the editor had responded.

So, why call it beginner’s luck? For one, I spelled the editor’s name wrong in my initial email. Not only was I lucky that she happened to be at her desk to read my misspelled email right as I sent it, or that she wasn’t so swamped with other submissions that she read mine right away, but she was also kind enough to overlook my blunder. In her response, she misspelled my name (point taken) before telling me she wanted to buy the article.

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I thought long and hard about whether or not I should make my first post this nice little welcome/intro/about me post. Then I thought, “No, that’s why I spent the last hour editing and tweaking the ‘about me’ section,” so better to dive right into what’s going on today in my writing life.

I have my first meeting today with a new writer’s group that I was invited to join when I attended The Writer’s Institute in May. It’s a newly-formed group, with four fiction writers total, all of whom have joined other groups in the past that later fizzled out. I’m trying to figure out why this is such a common occurrence with writer’s groups and hoping that it won’t happen again. The last workshop I joined was full of excellent writers, but we just couldn’t get our schedules to coincide. The one before that had a couple of members who didn’t take (constructive) criticism very well. Still another one had writers who just weren’t writing; after a few meetings, they’d run out of work to submit.

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