Hear Me Roar!

I just got tagged by Susan at The Urban Muse for a meme: "I am Writer, Hear Me Roar!" The idea is to post three tips on writing, then follow up by tagging five other writers. Here are my tips:

Read. Read a lot. There is absolutely nothing that will help your writing more. Read a lot of what you plan to write. If you're a sales letter writer, read all the junk mail that comes to your door. If you're doing article marketing, read what your competition is putting out there. If you want to write mystery novels, read everything you can get your hands on. Reading what's out there will help you learn and internalize the conventions of that market. Once you're "fluent," you'll have more to offer your clients.

Develop a thick skin. Even if you're the best there is, somebody out there won't like your style--or might just have some slight improvements to offer. It can be particularly tough for the best writers to accept criticism, because these high-performers are more used to receiving praise. But if you're going to do this professionally, that means a lot of people will see your writing--and it's impossible to please everyone. Do your best, learn from your experiences, and then make like a shark and keep moving.

Be persistent. Writing is all about endurance. Whether you're writing a novel or building a freelance business, the one who succeeds is the one who's in it for the long haul. Set an ongoing daily schedule you can live with, break big goals up into small, reasonable steps, and don't get freaked if you have to change the plan from time to time. Life isn't perfect, and you have to adapt to the situation on the ground.

Those are my tips for both the nuts-and-bolts and writing as a career. As for tagging, I'm now tagging: you. Put your own roar out into cyberspace, and post a link in my comments section once it's up. If you're feeling particularly generous, feel free to link to my site in your post. Happy meme-ing!

Blogging Green

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is the environment. Today thousands of bloggers across the net are writing about environmental topics and concerns. Not to sound like the old cliche, but I really did grow up in a log cabin in the woods--in Vermont, along a dirt road, out of sight of neighbors and miles from the nearest store. Vermont has very little zoning regulation, and as I've watched housing developments and parking lots and Wal-Marts threaten my hometown, I've grown very passionate about environmental issues.

It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to the environment. I never feel smaller or more ineffectual than when thinking about issues like global warming--it's easy to give up before I start, thinking I'm just one person and what difference can I possibly make?

I think that environmental activists would say, however, that as one person you're definitely making a negative difference by choosing to do nothing. And I also know that it's no good to look at the Big Picture when setting goals--you have to set goals that are possible for you on a day to day basis. So for Blog Action Day, I'm writing up a list of three easy, relatively cheap things you can do as a freelance writer to make a difference.

Work from home. As a work-from-home freelancer, you're already more environmentally friendly than most office workers. Every day, millions of people drive to work, putting about 333 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere yearly. By choosing not to drive to work every day, you are keeping a few tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and significantly reducing your own carbon footprint.

Recycle your office paper--and buy recycled paper. About 41% of solid waste in America is paper. In an office, paper makes up about 80% of that waste. It's a common misconception that recycled paper isn't appropriate for office use--it's thick and discolored and crumbly. But in fact, you can buy 100% recycled paper from Staples that looks exactly like ordinary printer and copy paper. The only difference is the price: it's slightly more expensive.

You are doing the world a favor by choosing to buy recycled paper for your office. For every ton of paper you use, you'll be saving about 17 trees. You'll also reduce the demand for paper made from scratch. This is good for several reasons.

Paper companies don't always harvest wild trees to make paper. Much of the time, they replant the forests they cut down. Sounds good, right? Well...not really. Tree farms often cut down older, diverse forests with established ecosystems, replacing them with a few species of trees that grow quickly and are great for making paper--usually softwoods. But the surrounding ecosystem was adapted to a naturally diverse forest of trees--and without them, it can fail.

By buying recycled paper, you also keep paper out of landfills. It's true that paper is biodegradable. But when it rots, it produces methane--a greenhouse gas twenty times worse than carbon dioxide. There's no doubt that the millions of tons of paper in our landfills is contributing to global warming.

Recycling paper also takes less energy--and emits less pollution--than creating it from scratch. Every ton of recycled paper saves approximately 8,000 gallons of water, plus three to four thousand kilowatt-hours of energy. Recycling paper also puts out 95% less air pollution than manufacturing paper from scratch.

So recycle your office paper--and buy recycled paper. This way, you can help reduce the demand for paper made from scratch, increase the demand for recycled paper, save natural forests, reduce global warming, help preserve natural ecosystems....whew! If that doesn't convince you to recycle paper, I don't know what will.

Use energy efficient bulbs. Simply by using compact fluorescent bulbs, you can save 50% to 90% of the energy used by incandescents. Using energy efficient bulbs saves about a ton of carbon dioxide. It's a smart economic choice, too. Over its lifetime, a compact fluorescent bulb will pay for itself, even though it's more expensive on the supermarket shelf.

Forget making big sacrifices, cutting the cord and living off the land--if just one person does that, it won't make much difference. But if every household in America simply replaced one incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent, we could reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as we could by removing 1.3 million cars from the road. Now that's change.

Eight Random Facts About Me

I've been tagged by Kathy Kehrli at the Irreverent Freelancer for a meme: "The Random 8 Meme: Tagged with My Pants Down!"

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you and post these rules.
2. List eight random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names with links.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

8 random facts about me:

1. I'm a classically trained singer.

2. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an actress on Broadway. I'm an (occasionally) working actress now: I've been in a few local commercials and lots of plays in and around Philly. I also model randomly sometimes. I'm on the cover of a romance novel: Kathryn Smith's Taken By the Night, which is coming out in November.

3. I started to write before I could actually write. I used to draw pictures on construction paper, then have my mom write captions underneath. She'd staple them together, and voila: my first paperbacks. She still has a filing cabinet full of these things, which she'll bring out and pass around when I bring guests over.

4. My current boyfriend and I celebrated our eight-year anniversary this June.

5. My favorite foods are sushi and Ethiopian.

6. I'm an avid downhill skier and used to be an instructor in high school and college.

7. I have six toes on one foot.

8. My bedroom has a working wood stove in it.

Just to make it interesting: ONE of these eight facts isn't true!

I'm now tagging Chris, Amy, Laura, Courtney, Susan, The Frump, Matt, and Rico.