Just one of those days.

Have you ever found yourself in one of those absurd, unexpected emotional states where the most irrelevant little thing can bring you to tears?Where the Hell is Matt? almost made me cry today.Watch the new 2008 video at the top of the page. I found it to be strangely touching and heartwarming. I think it's the background music that did it.Whatever it is... there you go.

The most amazing writer's resource I've seen in a long, long, long time. Yes, really.

I'll just steal the wording straight from the site, because Peter said I could:
Help a Reporter Out helps editors and reporters locate authors and other subject area experts willing to be interviewed for articles, books, blogs, and podcasts. Once you register – for free – you will receive up to 3 e-mails a day, each containing up to 10 detailed queries from reporters looking for individuals

Why I am no longer a Writer's Digest subscriber.

It's a matter of principle, really. I have a problem reading articles on how to gain credibility as a writer that are surrounded by advertisements for "pay us to print your book" publishers. I understand they need to make their money somewhere, but...

Ask someone who cares.

Is print dead?

That seems to be the #1 question in the publishing industry these days. We're heading full-tilt-boogie into a brand-new recession, after all, and that means advertisers and marketers everywhere are tightening their purse strings. As if print magazines didn't already have enough challenges, now we get to look forward to this.

I've been reading a lot of pontification and

I never thought of it like that.

Here is a little bite of food for thought to get you through the morning break. This comes from yesterday's MMPA editors' roundtable.

Editors, when you are hiring writers, how important are clips when it comes to your final decision? For me, they have always been the makers or breakers. A resume tells me little. According to resumes, everyone can write. I can't evaluate a writer until I see what

This is what they tell me.

Hi. My name is Serenity, and I am a Millennial.

That is what those who determine generational demographics say, anyway. Depending on the source, Millennials are those individuals born after '77, '78... '82, '84... right on up to '88, from what I've found. Ill-defined the generation seems to be, but according to most sources, I fall in there somewhere.

Within the industry for which I write, much

Freelance writing tips to live by.

Anna Goldsmith of The Hired Pens has a fun post at Copyblogger on freelance writing tips. These are good, old, common-business-sense tips from which we could all probably learn a little. My favorite:

Tip 5: But do go out to lunch. The writing life, especially the freelance writing life, can be isolating. And isolation leads to one thing: insanity. So set times for human contact helps, like lunch

Writings from the road. Part IV.

Originally written January 22, 2008.

Just in case you've been waiting to hear how my hotel shower went, I'll tell you. It was of the variety in which every minute adjustment of the knob produces a temperature variance
of about one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. A happy medium should really exist somewhere between "cold enough to induce hypothermia" and "hot enough to flay the flesh off a

Writings from the road. Part III.

Originally written January 22, 2008.

Which leads me nicely into another topic I've wanted to address for a while: the online persona of the writer.

The age of Internet innocence sure is over.

Not so long ago, we were all happy and excited because we could go online and find other people and start discussions and tell people how we really felt about all sorts of things. Now we have to be

Writings from the road. Part II.

Originally written January 22, 2008.

I really have had a few things on my mind to blog about lately. The Golfweek fiasco, for instance.

You know, as an editor, I don't deny one bit that I've made some pretty glaring errors in my time. But the Golfweek incident? Wow, is that stupid. You can't even classify that as an honest mistake, because they discussed it beforehand and they still did it. Wow