10th in a series: Read Part Nine or Go to Beginning My fortuitous trip to California for the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference landed the first contract for a book I had coauthored that was released by a traditional publisher. While that felt good, a couple of months prior to this trip, I experienced a separate…
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Ninth in a series: Read Part Eight or Go to Beginning In my last post, I talked about how God made it possible for us to move to Louisville. A month after our relocation, a brochure showed up in the mail for the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference. Until the pandemic temporarily killed it (it…
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Eighth in a series: Read Part Seven or Go to Beginning The late Jamie Buckingham was a prolific author who used to write a monthly column in Charisma. (I’ve been reading the magazine for 35-plus years—and wound up writing for it for 23 of them). So when I received a flyer in the mail about a…
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Seventh in a series: Read part six Among my fondest memories of my early freelancing days is the time I tried to help our pastor get published. He had seen an issue of a military-oriented magazine and wondered about submitting an article. “Well, don’t spend a lot of time working on it,” I said. “Let…
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Sixth in a series: Read the fifth post A mission statement is the mother’s milk of any endeavor, be that for a business, a church, a nonprofit or other organization. At least, that’s what I heard at several workshops I attended while trying to establish my business. Yet for the five years I did primarily…
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Fifth in a series: Read the fourth post In my last post, I mentioned the value of having a vision. But years ago, when I found myself pushed out of a job at a large public relations agency, I struggled to find one. I finally decided that taking a similar position would be a sideways…
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Fourth in a series: Read the third post A leading challenge for freelancers is lining up enough work to keep the lights on, the rent paid, and food on the table. How I made it while rarely having that kind of guarantee the past 35 years is almost beyond me. I say “almost” because I…
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Third in a series: Read the second post About 30 years ago, I attended a meeting where a man spoke about a very meaningful personal experience. Since I did some ghostwriting for a national magazine, I contacted him later and asked for more details, telling him I would write something and see if they were…
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Second in a series: read the First Post. Rejection is a fact of life in any creative pursuit, be that writing, speaking, music, teaching, preaching or other endeavor where you have to put yourself in front of the public. I would tell any aspiring freelance writer or editor (to paraphrase Harry Truman’s old saying) that…
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First in a series November 2, 1987, fell on a Monday. The reason I remember that particular detail so well is it marked the first day after the loss of the last remaining retainer of my public relations business. As if the stock market crash a couple of weeks earlier weren’t bad enough, just before…
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