New Posts in the Sanity Bubble

Click here to visit and read the current month of Sanity Bubble (formerly Mental Health for Writers) blog entries:

More About the Experiment with Voices and Chance (July 24)
Talking With: Dwight Bitikofer (July 18)
An Experiment with Voices and Chance (July 18)
Why Housepets Are Not a Good Subject for a Book (July 13)
Never Do Anything Out of Desperation (July 7)
The 32 Drawings (July 3)
How Not to Begin Your Meditative Essay (July 1)
Screening Test: Is the Applicant a "Writer"? (June 28)

New Blog Posts

Recent posts in the Sanity Bubble; comments welcome:

• Literary Lies (April 19)
• Why the Agent Stops Reading at Page 2 (April 15)
• Talking With: Alice Azure, Native American Author (April 14)
• Here's a Rejection I Like (April 12)
• The Myth of the Lone Writer (April 11)
• Time Trick That Works (April 8)
• Turning Away from Toxic Friends (April 5)
• Why Katie Couric Didn't Wash (April 3)
• Writing an Author a Fan Letter (April 2)
• They Don't Want You to Write (March 28)
• Scary Me: I Get a Clue (March 27)
• I Want to Be Another Poet (March 26)
  

Catch Up on the Blog

Go to the Sanity Bubble for new posts:

The King and I (24 March)
Coming: Professional-Writer Certification (22 March)
The Fake Job Interview (21 March)
St. Louis Indie Bookstore Alliance Goes Wild (13 March)
Using "Dialect" in Poetry and Prose (5 March)
What's Wrong with Flashbacks (3 March)
Don't Let Your Prologue Give Your Novel Away (3 March)

Blog Has Moved - and Been Renamed - Go There!

Hello. My new online home including the blog (now renamed "Sanity Bubble") is BookEval.com. You can leave comments on the entries as usual. I will eventually move all 300 blog entries onto that site. Come see my amazing new space! Thank you so much.

What Are You Worth Per Hour?

Maybe you can’t make a living wage from your fiction or poems or essays. But you CAN make money using the array of skills you employ when you do creative writing. Here are some of your skills. Not everyone can say they have them! How good are you at each of these, and how experienced? Do you know what they are worth? Can you set a price on them? That’s the first step toward getting paid.

-copyediting $_____ per hour

-evaluation of manuscripts/critical feedback $____per hour

-teaching or leading a workshop $____ per hour

-writing queries, proposals, or synopses $____per hour

-researching potential publication venues $____per hour

-navigating and gathering information from websites helpful to writers, such as litmags.org or duotrope.com, and preparing to impart this information to those who want it $____per hour

-generating “content”: writing articles for publication or the web $____per hour

Those are just some of the skills you are probably undervaluing! More later, plus actual figures you SHOULD be charging.

Thanks to Becky Ellis of the blog cherrypiepress.blogspot.com for finding litmags.org.

Top Ten Blogs for Writers

Thanks to Tricia Grissom over at one of my favorite blogs, Coffee and Critique, for posting the link to the megablog that has picked the Top Ten Blogs for Writers out of hundreds of nominations. The top selections focus on going for the gold -- selling freelance articles. If you have not yet learned how to write articles for a mass audience, or have never tried, you can enroll in a journalism course and learn it in a short 15 weeks. In any case, the blogs are upbeat and inspiring, and we all need that right now.

Plain Talk about Agents

For serious dirt on Why You Need to Have an Agent, please see above link by Editorial Ass (a recovering Editorial Assistant). It's probably all true. Repeat: Publishing is a business. If you don't do business, you won't get your books published by major houses.