On a roll?

Yesterday a Biznik colleague asked me asked me how things were going and I replied, mentioning that I haven't been doing much networking within the group because I've discovered the best clients for my web writing services are mid-size (50 -100 employee) businesses, not small ones.

It's just a year since I left Apple to put together a freelance webwriting business, and I've discovered quite a bit. I've had some great contract gigs, and some disappointing ones. Because I'm underwriting 2006 and 2007 from my Apple savings, I still have the luxury of picking and choosing my contracts, focusing on people and areas I like or new opportunities I want to explore.

I check several freelance and contract listings daily, and have learned to recognize the lousy pieces of work. It's easy to spot the obvious ones -- the advertiser has no idea what he or she wants, or expects to get writing work for peanuts. But some of the least desirable pieces of work (for me, at least) are the ones where the job description has been written by someone in an HR department: The ad's about two pages long, sternly describes the job duties in a long list of jargon-laden bullet points, asks you to submit a resume that goes back to your summer jobs during college, and requires that candidates have "min. two years experience" working with a piece of web-publishing software that most bloggers could master in 15 minutes. My blood runs cold at the thought of interviewing with, much less working for, this type of organization.

Late yesterday afternoon I spotted a job posting, five sentences long, in which the head of a Seattle-area company was looking for an experienced web content writer. The ad clearly defined the work. I replied (in five sentences and some hyperlinks).

I'll report later in the week about what happened next.

Remember fact-checking?

In the late 1970s I co-authored an article for Psychology Today magazine that was rigorously fact-checked by someone at the publication. Every person I had interviewed was called, the spelling of their names confirmed, and their ages and other identifying information verified. Dates and sequences of events (we were writing about the aftermath of the war in Vietnam) were checked as well.

Print magazines are still known for their rigorous fact-checking, or at least some spot-checking; most require writers to submit contact information on all sources. Webzines, by contrast, follow the newspaper tradition of minimal fact-checking. As this Slate article explains the system, "writers are responsible for the accuracy of their pieces, editors do their best to backstop them, and more often than anybody will admit, copy editors save all of us from embarrassment with their last-second interventions."

Slate, however, has a self-appointed fact-checker who's been sending in corrections to the website since 2000. I'm proud to say that the fact-checker, profiled by Slate last week, is my cousin RM "Auros" Harman.

Common knowledge (lite)

Are cultural reference points once provided by books and films (complex narratives consumed in one sitting) being replaced by reference points provided by shorter bursts of information: blogs, celebrity gossip, and TV shows? This op-ed piece by Neil Gabler in the LA Times (pointed out here in the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog) confirms my suspicions that this is indeed the trend. Gabler focuses his analysis on the impact of this trend on the movie industry:

"In this culture, the intrinsic value of a movie, or of most conventional entertainments, has diminished. Their job now is essentially to provide stars for People, Us, "Entertainment Tonight" and the supermarket tabloids, which exhibit the new "movies" — the stars' life sagas.

"Traditional movies have a very difficult time competing against these real-life stories, whether it is the shenanigans of TomKat or Brangelina, Anna Nicole Smith's death or Britney Spears' latest breakdown. These are the features that now dominate water-cooler chat. There may have been a time when these stories generated publicity for the movies. Now, however, the movies are more likely to generate publicity for the stories, which have a life, and an entertainment value, of their own."

Nothing lost in translation

I'm back from three days of dancing at the Saratoga Dance Flurry in a very good mood. That's what lots of oxygen will do for your cells. I kept up with email on the trip, thanks to pretty much ubiquitous airport/hotel/coffee shop wifi, but didn't follow any blogs.

This morning I've been catching up on those. Many of the writers seem to be in exceptionally good spirits (early spring fever?). I particularly enjoyed John Gruber's post at Daring Fireball, which is a translation of the Macrovision CEO's reply to Apple's recent "Thoughts on Music" about digital rights management.

As usual, the translation from Corporate-Speak to plain English made things considerably shorter; I thought Gruber's rendering of the opening paragraph was exceptionally succinct.

Up in the air

Many years ago, I trained and managed fundraising volunteers for United Way. This contract work ran on an annual (campaign) cycle, and there was a point in the spring when you'd pull out the previous year's campaign plan and update it for the coming year.

My two favorite places to brainstorm for the update were the old lunchroom at Nordstrom (now long gone) and the ferry that runs between downtown Seattle and Bremerton. Both were places where I could spread out my papers on a table and be left completely alone to think.

In the past few years, I've done some of my best "big picture" work on airplanes: No officemates. No emails. No phones. No iChat. No Google. No UPS deliveries. No cats. No errands. And, yes, it is possible to do certain types of work without access to the web.

Tomorrow I'll be flying to the East Coast for the Saratoga Dance Flurry. I'm looking forward to eight hours of quality thinking and writing time with a 12-inch PowerBook and a pair of noise-cancelling earphones. (I'll be trying to forget that my husband just bought the latest model of Bose noise-cancelling earphones and they're smaller -- and more effective -- than mine.)

Our bad

Book editor and reviewer Pat Holt is blunt about the "10 mistakes writers don't see (but can easily fix when they do)." I think some of her comments verge on the nit-picky, but #8 -- that's the tough one.

Another grand master

One of the most magical and powerful forms of writing is songwriting; that may be why so many contemporary fiction writers pay royalty fees to be able to quote popular songs in their novels.

Last night we went to the Paramount to hear one of the grand singer/songwriters: Merle Haggard. I'd forgotten what an immense repertoire he has, and how gorgeous his voice is (think Willie Nelson, then add a range that runs considerably deeper).

Haggard, born in 1937, has been performing since he got out of prison in 1960 (inspired to go straight by seeing Johnny Cash perform and by talking with Caryl Chessman). Though I've danced in honkytonks for years to Haggard's songs played by other bands, I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard him live with his 10-piece ensemble, the Strangers, before. If you haven't, and you're interested in great songwriting and masterful performance, here's his tour schedule. Note that March 9 - 25 he'll be on a national tour with Willie Nelson, Ray Price, and Asleep at the Wheel that includes two nights at The Backyard in Austin (of course those two dates are sold out).

It's be-good-to-your-Mac month

My colleagues at TidBITS and Take Control Ebooks have designated February as the “Month of Apple Sales."

They're bundling some of their best-selling Mac titles and offering the bundles at tremendous discount.

The current bundle -- priced at just $22 -- gets you a 60% discount on these seven ebooks:

• Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger
• Take Control of Customizing Tiger
• Take Control of Users & Accounts in Tiger
• Take Control of Syncing in Tiger
• Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X
• Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac (this one I highly recommend)
• Take Control of Your Airport Network

Use this code to get your special discounted price: CPN70205MOAS1.

Take Control will offer other Mac-related bundles later in the month, so if you don’t see a "package deal" you want today, just check back later.

Find out more about the Month of Apple Sales at: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/offers/moas1.html