Years ago, boys often wanted to be firemen and policemen while girls frequently aimed at nursing or teaching in addition to being a mom. Since more types of work became more available to both sexes, today’s girls may be the ones who want to fight fires and catch criminals while boys may be looking forward to the joys of nursing and teaching or being stay-at-home dads. Both girls and boys are often excited about becoming rock stars, professional athletes, and performers.

You can see that shift in vocational interest among my children. My older daughter is a doctor while my older son is a nurse. My younger son is a museum curator and my older nephew is a teacher. My younger daughter is a television producer’s assistant.

Shifts in work preferences also occur after children learn more about what’s involved in various careers.
Here’s a personal example:

As a child, I was fascinated by the idea of becoming a judge after reading the biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. After learning more about what most judges do while attending law school, my career interest shifted to management consulting. I felt that applied creativity and hard work could do more to help solve important human issues as a consultant than in any courtroom role.

Youthful experiences also matter in determining what careers seem promising and potentially rewarding. For instance, Dr. Erik Myhrberg explored the world in a way that few American youth of his day did. His father worked for an international airline, and the family frequently followed his dad’s new assignments to different global locales . . . averaging a move every year while he was growing up.

At a time when many fewer Americans traveled or lived outside the United States, Dr. Myhrberg observed that the people he met around the world were more similar than different. The cultural differences he observed fascinated him, and he wanted to learn more about the world’s cultures. As a result, he looked forward to becoming an international attorney and using his profession to help bring people of all nations closer together. It was a worthy, heart-felt desire.

After starting college in the United States, Dr. Myhrberg learned a lot more about the American legal
profession . . . most of which he didn’t like. By the time he was a college senior, he had abandoned
international law as a career goal.

Instead, he wanted to work internationally and teach. But what kind of work should he do?

In the last hundred years, business has changed in so many ways that good strategic and operating methods are now almost the opposite of what they once were.

In its day, the highly centralized operations of the Ford Motor Company in Michigan were a marvel of
mass-production efficiency; the firm assembled its millions of vehicles on perpetually moving lines where workers simply did one or two activities, continually supplied by mountains of self-produced parts crafted from raw materials at its mines and the nearby Ford steel and glass works.

Today, automobile companies make almost none of their parts and produce none of the raw materials for parts. As a further difference, some of the more advanced vehicle makers (such as Toyota) don’t employ assembly lines, favoring instead team-based assembly in fixed locations to which parts from an ever-changing list are fed by suppliers just as they are needed. Instead of being sourced locally, purchased parts often travel almost half way around the world to reach an automobile plant.

There’s good news and bad in that shift in manufacturing methods. It’s wonderful for the people who now make the components that others use half a world away. Their salaries and prospects rise. It’s a challenge, however, for the automobile assembler unless the components fit perfectly and work well together.

With people in so many different countries attempting to cooperate with others who speak different languages, use different measurements, and favor alternative quality standards, there’s a possibility of creating expensive chaos rather than an effective system of smoothly operating cooperative enterprises.

To help suppliers and their customers, international standards makers (such as ISO, International
Organization for Standardization) have developed rules that smooth the flow of useful commerce by ensuring that customers and suppliers understand each other and work well together. While not everyone is going to speak the same language, everyone can employ complementary business processes designed to consistently deliver what their customers need . . . when they need what they buy.

After learning about the international standards, Dr. Myhrberg decided he would like to help suppliers and customers understand and apply the standards to their processes and activities. Within a year after graduating with Master’s degree in International Management from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), he launched a consulting firm, Moorhill International Group, to provide this kind of assistance.

Moorhill prospered, and Dr. Myhrberg enjoyed having more opportunities for international travel to explore outstanding processes and gain occasional teaching engagements. For one three-day lecture about ISO, he spent three months working hard to prepare his ideas for the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Once in Beijing, he was impressed by his listeners who were the cream of the crop from various Chinese academic disciplines. He also found the experience contained an irony: While most of those who were listening held Ph.D. degrees, he did not.

Drawing confidence from his success in China, Dr. Myhrberg decided that the time had come to earn a doctorate and gain credibility that he hoped would expand his teaching opportunities. Concerned about the possible cost, time involvement, and distractions involved in earning the prestigious Ph.D. degree, Dr. Myhrberg carefully investigated many schools.

He read all the published material provided by the schools, spoke with former students, reviewed what had been written about the schools in business publications, and contacted the schools.

After being admitted into one Ph.D., he was immediately impressed by a genuinely written e-mail from a faculty member:

“Hello Mr. Myhrberg:

“A sincere welcome to Rushmore University, and the Rushmore system of learning.

“Beyond the uniqueness of the teaching style of the University lies the true value you achieve — the ability to integrate the learning modules into your everyday life.

“On behalf of the Faculty, Staff, and Administration of Rushmore, it’s my pleasure to welcome you as a new member in good standing in our University community.

“With your acceptance, you are continuing a journey to learning and experience that will enrich your life and your lifestyle.

“Alan Guinn, Professor”

Friendly professional communications continued through e-mails from his advisor and editor, and he was glad to have chosen Rushmore.

Dr. Myhrberg realized that he could enhance his academic credentials and standing in the business community by focusing his Ph.D. studies on writing a dissertation that could be published right after graduation. As an expert on standards, he chose to write a dissertation that has since been published as A Practical Field Guide for ISO 2001:2000 (MIGI, Moorhill Press, 2004).

After graduating from Rushmore, he coauthored another book with Dawn Holly Crabtree, A Practical Field Guide for AS 9100:2004 (ASQ Quality Press, 2006), that provides further hands-on direction for learning, applying, and maintaining international standards.

Compared to his prior learning experiences, Dr. Myhrberg was grateful for the opportunity to study at Rushmore through the Oxford tutorial style. He appreciated having an academic advisor to help him plan and engage in his study program as well as a technical editor to improve his writing. He was also happy that the university provided expertise in so many subjects and sub specialties that were of interest to him. Not least, he appreciated the flexible payment options that made his studies more affordable.

With a strong desire to teach, Dr. Myhrberg was delighted to receive an invitation (which he accepted) to become an associate professor at Rushmore. In this role, he has enjoyed the opportunity to tutor those with a passion for international standards. Clients often ask him to conduct classes to help their organizations implement the standards. Increasingly, he is asked to be the official trainer for these client organizations on the subject of international standards.

Because of his dissertation, Dr. Myhrberg had completed the research necessary to take on more writing and speaking assignments. By providing credibility for his expertise, His dissertation is also an effective career platform.

Due to his well-received books, Dr. Myhrberg is more frequently asked to speak now and he enjoys those engagements. He also hears more often from his peers at the national and international level.

Since graduating, his consulting assignments have come more frequently from larger companies and higher level executives. The assignments themselves tend to be larger, more complicated, and integrated into the organizations’ activities.

What are the lessons for you in choosing and developing a great career?

1. Find out who works on the tasks that fascinate you.

2. Investigate which of those roles would be the most fun for you.

3. Develop the knowledge and experience you need to be a top performer.

4. Share your insights by speaking with other top performers.

5. Become better known through research-based writing.

6. Teach the next generation to follow in your footsteps.

7. Keep improving.

I wish you well in applying these lessons.

Donald W. Mitchell is a professor at Rushmore University, an online school. For more information about ways to engage in fruitful lifelong learning at Rushmore to increase your effectiveness and improve your career, visit http://www.rushmore.edu.

Did you ever have one of those days with your children where you just wish you could hit the restart button? Start the day over and this time avoid all the chaos or bad moods? We’ve all experienced those times when the children are just a little out of control, a little louder than we’d like or not paying attention to what they should be doing. While a restart button isn’t positioned clearly on your child’s back, ready for use, there are ways to find it.

To hit a restart button for a child, break the pattern they are stuck in. Get this behavior to stop abruptly and be replaced with one completely different. This is most effectively accomplished by doing some action yourself that will surprise them and garner their attention. Get creative in finding ways to get their attention, forget the typical such as clapping your hands or singing a “pay attention” song, make it fun and you’ll be much more effective in getting their cooperation! Break the rules, or join them when they do, to snap them into attention. Act in a manner they would never expect, surprise them with your talents! To “restart” effectively means to STOP, then START again.

So first consider what would get them to stop what they are currently doing. For children, this usually means presenting them with some thing or some action that is much more interesting than that which they are playing with or doing at the moment. Once their attention shifts, you can direct it to an activity you’d prefer for them to engage in.

You’ve all heard the expression that “you catch more bees with honey,” meaning being nice is always a better way to gather the attention or cooperation of others. Children are no different. For them, the ruling factor is how much fun they think they will have. If they consider what they are doing more fun than stopping to listen to you talk about the rules of an “inside voice” then you’ll lose.

But, if you present them with something more fun than their current activity, such as the possibility of a surprise or something new, then you’ll win their hearts and attention. Another can phrase we hear is “curiosity killed the cat” but in our case it’s – curiosity kills the chaos! Present the children with something to pique their curiosity and they’ll stop the chaos in a hurry to check it out.

For example, your children are running in circles around the room, possibly screaming just for the fun of it. You walk calmly into the middle of the room with a chair set it down, stand on it (or sit if this is physically challenging), and cover your head with a blanket. The children will possibly slow down down to watch with curiosity when you enter the room carrying a chair, but when you stand and cover your head – WHACK! – that restart button is hit and they will not be able to resist stopping and coming over to see what you’re doing. While under the blanket, take a 10 second hiatis from the chaos! By the time you’re done, the children will be fully engaged in wondering just what you’re doing! You can then surprise them, throw off the blanket with a shout and jump to the floor where giggles and hugs await you. You have effectively restarted their day.

Some other tools for finding that restart button:

-If a child is dumping toys, join them and jump too!

-In a large box, wrap special items such as a book to read together or a cookie recipe to bake together. Bring out into room when things get crazy – but don’t talk about it, just sit box down and walk away! The wrapped box with get their attention and after you firmly have grasped their attention, allow them to rip it open to find the surprise.

-Put on a head set and play music, dance and sing to it in the room until the children ask what you are listening to, then plug into a speaker and have a dance party!

-Using a deck of cards, begin to wordlessly walk around the room placing cards in a variety of spots. When you’ve gained their attention, play a seek and find game: name a card for them to find.

-Bring a pile of dress up items into the room, slowly begin to put them on. (Hat, gloves, feather boa, ruffle dress, cape, etc.)

The next time things go a bit crazy with the kids don’t hit the panic button – hit the restart button!

Patricia Dischler is Author of , “From Babysitter To Business Owner: Getting The Most Out Of Your Home Child Care Business” and “Because I Loved You: A Birthmother’s View Of Open Adoption.” For more tips,  read “Kid Biz Newsletter,” an ezine featuring tips, tricks, and information for the child care professional. Subscribe at http://www.patriciadischler.com.

You’ll be surprised how easy it becomes and how much quicker you accomplish it with time. This article
addresses issues for both the DIY article marketer and those looking to outsource the work.

The Do-It-Yourself Group:

I would recommend that all newbies to the world of internet marketing write their own articles at the onset of their business. I say this for two reasons:

* You learn early on what makes a good article; whether you write it or hire it done for you. You will do more harm for your business than good if you distribute sub-standard content across the Internet. It also defrays start-up expenses at a crucial time in most cases.

* You learn everything there is to know about your niche through the research you must do. You grow into a legitimate expert in your field and not just a parrot of what the product producer says.

Before you write the first word, go to the major players in the field and see HOW you must write to be
accepted on their sites. Every directory or submissions service has their own set of rules for accepting
content for publication.

I do an end-run around all of that and use a submissions service that submits articles to over 5,000
publishers with one click of the mouse. Articles are not distributed until they meet the criteria required by all publishers for acceptance. It makes life easier and it’s free to boot.

Here are some key factors to make permanent habits in your article writing program:

* People read about 20% slower online than in print. If you make it hard for them, expect to lose them early on. Write in bursts of 8-14 words per sentence in paragraphs of 3-5 sentences maximum. Use sub-titles often.

* Write article between 550-800 words long. Shorter will not be published on many directories and longer tends to bore readers.

* Internet surfers are scanners first, readers second. They arrive at your article page while following the “information scent” they sniffed out through their search criteria. They scan the page in an “F” pattern looking for hints of the scent that brought them there. If they don’t find it on the scan-zoom-they’re gone. You have about 5-15 seconds to catch their interest.

* Use your main keywords in your titles and sub-headings when possible. Use keywords at or near the beginning of the first sentence in paragraphs. This makes it easier to “sniff” them out in a quick scan for the “information scent.”

* The rules for numbers are different online than offline. It’s “ok” to use numerals instead of spelling our numbers less than 10. It enhances the scanability of the piece by offering a quick glimpse at the statistical content in the piece.

* Bulleted/numbered lists are your friend. Use them often. It is not recommended, however, that you mix them up - use either/or per piece you write.

* Avoid the passive voice. It drags your content out and slows the readers progress; often causing them to leave. You will usually find the passive voice around verbs that end in “ing.”

* For Pete’s sake, use a word processor to write on that uses a good spell/grammar checker. I run an article directory and will tell you firsthand: spelling and grammar count. Publishers are building a reputation with their sites and simply won’t publish the “also rans.”

The Outsourcing Crew:

Not too much to say here other than you get what you pay for in most cases. A motocross friend of mine told me something years ago I have found useful in numerous situations: “If you have a $10.00 head, buy a $10.00 helmet.” If you want professionally written content that captures your target audience and sells the click on your link in the author’s box expect to pay more than $5-10.00 per article.

I hire and fire writers all day long. My rule of thumb is this: if it takes me longer than 5 minutes to edit
a piece, I kick it back to the writer or fix it myself and don’t use that writer again.

If you use a provider that sends you work you must edit heavily, replace them. Your time is too valuable to do work you already paid to have done. Find a professional writing service that gets the bulldog fed.

Mike Lawson is a freelance writer and entrepreneur. He is working on a novel and writes poetry as well. Learn more about his professional writing services at: Bluegrass Solutions.

“We lift ourselves by our thought. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.”
–Orison Sweet Marden, 1850-1924, Author and Founder of Success Magazine

How do you see yourself in your mind’s eye? When you think about  yourself or get an image of yourself, do you value what you see?

IMAGE WHO YOU WANT TO BE

One powerful way of becoming who you want to be is to begin to image yourself as you want to be in many different life situations. For  example:

• Who do you want to be when someone is attacking you or criticizing you? How do you want to respond?

• Who do you want to be when challenging events occur in your life? How do you want to respond?

• Who do you want to be regarding honesty and integrity?

• Who do you want to be regarding your management of time?

• Who do you want to be regarding the organization of your living and work environment?

• Who do you want to be regarding the health of your physical body - how you eat, how much you exercise, how much sleep you get?

• Who do you want to be regarding the way you treat other people, especially loved ones?

• Who do you want to be regarding how you think and feel in your everyday life?

• Who do you want to be regarding your spiritual life?

Holding an image of “the ideal of yourself as you long to be,” as Marden states in the above quote, is an important way of moving yourself toward your ideal. It is not enough to think of yourself in these ways - you need to actually image yourself as you want to be. Create little videos in your mind’s eye of these different situations in your life, seeing yourself as you want to be.

LOOK FOR ROLE MODELS

Think about the people in your life, or people you know about, or even film characters, whom you admire. It is important, in creating your inner images, that you find role models of people behaving in the ways you admire. Then put yourself into those images, seeing yourself behaving in these admirable ways. Thoughts and images are very powerful in changing feelings and behavior.

All of us have been programmed to respond to the challenging situations in our lives by our experiences as we were growing up. You will continue to respond with your automatic programmed responses unless you consciously decide to reprogram yourself. Consciously creating thoughts and images about who you want to be is a form of reprogramming. Since you have practiced your old programming your whole life, it takes an ongoing conscious effort to create new responses. This is why Marden, in the above quote, states that you must “Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.”

We each have the free will and the power to become who we long to be, but it will not happen without conscious and continuous effort. This kind of change does not just happen, nor does it happen quickly. If
you decided to learn to play a musical instrument, you would know that you would need to practice, practice, practice in order to become proficient at it. Becoming who you want to be takes just as much, if not more, practice! Why not begin today creating the images of who you want to be and start practicing them?

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books, including “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?” and “Healing Your Aloneness.” She is the co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® healing process. Learn Inner Bonding now! Visit her web site for a free Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com or email her at margaret@innerbonding.com . Phone sessions available.

Instead of turning out to sea where the storm would have dissipated or going into the Carolinas, it was sandwiched between two warm air masses and funneled into toward Long Island, NY and coastal Connecticut region. The storm resulted over 50,000 homes being destroyed and the death of 500 people. With the rich history brought out by primary and secondary sources, there have been numerous publications on this tragic event.

The first book that highlights these events in detail is, The Great Hurricane: 1938 by Cherrie Burns. In this book, the author details personal accounts from both Long Island and Connecticut residence about the event. In her book she also points out the lack of a sufficient weather system and how there were signs that pointed where the storm was heading toward New England. By using primary sources and first hand accounts of the events that night, Burns’ book will captivate you while offering a window into the past and allows you to feel as if you were eating dinner on the Connecticut shoreline that night. The book cost roughly $5.00.

Another book about this faithful night is A Wind to Shake the World: The Story of the 1938 Hurricane by Everett Allen. Unlike the previous author, Allen was a journalist who had first hand account of this. Burns’ book is considered a secondary source whereas Allen’s book is considered a primary source. In this book, the author talks about how the storms affect the different areas of Long Island and Connecticut. Allen also covers the results, destruction and the cost of the storm. Like Burns, he mentions the loss of lives and the lack of an adequate weather system. The price of this book would be around $8.00.

Another local author is Mary Cummings. She wrote the book Hurricane in the Hamptons, 1938. In her book, Cummings draws from her resources as an employee at the South Hampton Historical Museum. In her book she has provided handfuls of pictures from people and newspapers. She too draws from the local accounts about what happened on Long Island and Connecticut. This book does something the other two do not and that is offers numerous visuals. There is less text but more pictures.

All three books offer great insight on this event. With many people being unaware of what was coming, it was one of the worst storms to hit Connecticut and New England. It caused a lot of damage with homes and the communities. It is rare when a weather event like a hurricane comes to Connecticut but when it does it is historical and is brought out by books.

Samson Paulotti shares information with homeowners. Visit  The Restoration Resource Connecticut City Index.

Honestly assessing your writing temperament can help you be more productive; you’ll learn to work with your natural strengths and navigate around the spots that give you trouble. We continue in our exploration of the most common types of temperaments (and you may see yourself in more than one) with a look at “The Island.”

The others (discussed in separate articles) are:

Sir Starts-a-lot, The Perfectionist, Fool for a Deadline and The Tofu Artist (a.k.a. The Feedback-Dependent Writer).

Writing temperament: THE ISLAND

Writers need other writers. Trust me: there’s nothing like the support of fellow writers to keep you going. But even beyond that, writers need other people - they need first readers, people to offer them feedback before the manuscript ends up on a editor’s desk. The Island type of writer doesn’t believe that and never passes off the work to anyone else for review.

Among Islands, there are two subsets:

a) The Over-Confident Island The first type of Island doesn’t bother sharing his work with others because he “knows they just won’t get it.” You may be picking up a note of disdain in that statement (and you’d be right). He often believes the failure to connect with his work is the fault of the reader’s stupidity and not in any flaws in his writing. Of course what the over-confident Island fails to remember is that editors and agents are readers, too, and they won’t slog through something that the Island’s bowling league or critique group won’t.

Even though it manifests as over-confidence (and sometimes that’s exactly what it is), this “They just don’t get it” attitude might be a defense mechanism that protects a deep vulnerability. Whatever the root cause, the Island hampers his chances for breaking into print when he rejects the perspective of others and overnights his manuscript directly from his palm-treed acre to a New York publishing house. We’re all too close to our work to see it objectively. That’s where others come in.

For confidence to work for the writer, it must be balanced with humility, which allows for an openness and willingness to learn, to listen, to grow.

b) The Fearful Island (a.k.a. The Under-Confident Island or the Overly-Humble Island) This Island subset doesn’t keep her work close because she mistrusts others’ abilities — she doesn’t have faith in her own. She’s driven to write, often she really enjoys writing, and she dreams about holding her very own published book in her hands. But when it comes time to push her words off the safety of her island, she balks.

She doesn’t think her work is good enough, and unlike the perfectionist who labors in the hope that it will feel done at some point, the fearful Island isn’t so sure any of her efforts will transform her work into something dazzling. And so she finishes it and keeps it locked away. And finishes something else and locks that up, too. She blushes and changes the subject when someone asks her about her writing “hobby.” If someone asks to see something she’s written, she drops the Martini tray she’s holding, oblivious to the little toothpicked-olives bouncing along the parquet floor.

The sad thing: there are heaps of Fearful Islands out there, which means there are brilliant works out there, doomed to locked drawers, that we’ll never get to explore and enjoy.

Take heart: Like all of these temperament classifications, the Fearful Island is a mindset, and mindsets can be changed. You can consciously change the way you think. It takes work and commitment and persistence, but it’s quite doable when the will accompanies it.

If your goal is publication (and it is for all the writers I work with), you must balance humility with a healthy dose of confidence.

Benefit: For either Island type, you are spared rejection, spared the discomfort of a lukewarm reception of your work. You will never hear the sting of, “Huh. That just didn’t work for me. What were you shooting for?” (Although we often need to hear that, it hurts — no matter how tactfully the message is sent.)

Cost: You know you can’t get published unless you throw your manuscript in the ring. But it’s also true that you can’t get better unless you revise, and you can’t revise fully and meaningfully unless you get outside feedback. That’s one of writing’s immutable laws. And although rules can often be broken with success, not that one.

And remember: If writing is important to you (second only to a select group of humans), you can succeed with the right attitude, no matter what writing temperament you are.

To discover more ways to make your writing habit more efficient, satisfying and fun visit ManuscriptRx and sign up for “Write Through It,” a free, monthly e-newsletter newsletter that offers practical writing advice and anecdotal wisdom.

Lucia Zimmitti, a writing coach and independent editor, is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Her fiction and poetry have been published in various national literary journals, and she has taught writing at the high school and college levels.

The English language, like mathematics, has rules that make your message clear and understandable. In today’s era of e-mail and text communications, some may feel the rules of communication are largely unimportant as long as one gets the message across. But we know from verbal communication that how one says something is often as important, maybe even more important, than the actual words being said.

When you want to ensure your written communications are professional and clear, knowing the following three few self-editing tricks can enhance your prose.

1. Check Your Commas

One piece of punctuation that frequently trips up even the best writers is the comma. While the comma has many different rules and uses, one of the most helpful is this: don’t use a comma if two sentences divided by a period will do. Make a statement. End the sentence. Following this rule will help you avoid run-on sentences and keep your writing simple and easy to read.

2. Simplify Your Sentence Construction

Grammar rules are difficult to understand, even for English students. But knowing what a strong sentence looks like, and then not straying far from that construction, can be helpful.

Every sentence has nouns and verbs. For example, consider three parts of the sentence, “The boy runs to the store.” The most important part is the verb, or action word, “runs.” The other two parts are both nouns. “Boy” is the subject, the thing doing the action, while “store” is the object, the thing being acted upon. In effect, this structure amounts to noun, verb, noun, or “a something does something to something.”

An easy way to figure out if a sentence is strong and active is to make sure the answers to the following three questions are clear in the way your sentence is constructed:

• What is being done?
• Who or what is doing it?
• Who or what is it being done to?

Now consider this sentence: “It is the boy who ran to the store.” It has the same three parts from the first example. “Boy” is the subject. “Ran” is the verb. And “store” is the object. However, it has extras words that weaken the sentence’s meaning: “who,” “it,” and “is.” And adding these words broke away from the “a something does something to something” model, weakening the overall effect.

3. Activate Your Verbs

Another important rule is use the imperative verb form rather than the form with the suffix “-ing.” The imperative form is a verb’s un-conjugated form. For instance, “to deliver” is the imperative root of “delivers,” “delivered,” “will deliver,” and “delivering.” In many cases, “-ing” verbs are a sign of a weak or awkward sentence.

Now consider the sentence: “The boy runs to the store delivering apples.” While the sentence is not incorrect, the imperative form can be used with a stronger clarifying effect: “The boy runs to the store to deliver apples.”

Self-Editing Your Writing

Although it always helps to have your work professionally edited, you can use these tips to eliminate many of the grammar and style issues that weaken your writing. These rules make it easy to find unclear sentences and keep your writing active, concise, and professional.


Melinda Copp is a writing coach, book editor, and ghostwriter who specializes in helping aspiring authors achieve their writing goals. Sign up for Melinda’s free e-zine, and learn the top ten mistakes aspiring authors make and how to avoid them!

If you’ve made it past your teens, you’ve learned that denial doesn’t work in relationships. Pretending to be someone you’re not will only catch up with you in a complicated, unpleasant way at some point. The same holds true for your relationship with your writing self. Telling yourself you have a different writing personality than you actually do will only slow you down and make you less efficient and more frustrated when you sit down at the desk. In this, the fifth and final installment of the writing temperament discussion, we look at the writer who is overly dependent on outside feedback.

The Tofu Artist (a.k.a. The Feedback-Dependent Writer)

Tofu takes on the flavor of whatever is in the skillet along with it. So, in a sense, tofu doesn’t have a strong flavor of its own; it only borrows the flavors of the ingredients around it.

That’s all well and good for tofu, but you, dear writer, are not tofu.

A polar opposite of the Island (the type of writer who decides s/he never, ever needs anyone’s help in getting published), the Tofu Artist is overly dependent on others. She doesn’t have a clear enough vision of her own work and waits for others to crystallize things for her. She is far too willing to drastically alter her work based on someone else’s feedback. She doesn’t even truly know what kinds of things she wants to write, but decides she’ll write whatever the market currently dictates.

(It obviously makes sense to have an awareness of the market so you’re not sending your book/proposal to completely irrelevant agents/editors, but if you try to write what is “hot” right now, you’ll write yourself into a corner, because it may be lukewarm or even cold by the time your draft is done and shopped around. Also, your lack of artistic conviction will show on the page. Write what moves and compels you first; figure out how it fits into the marketplace later.)

Don’t indiscriminately incorporate feedback into your work. Quiet outside advice until you can hear your own. Then make decisions about which pieces of advice resonate for you and which feel way off base. Don’t be afraid to toss the input that strikes you as unhelpful. Taste in writing is highly subjective, without concrete rights and wrongs. And if you don’t believe that you have the elusive answer or the magic key, then why would you grant that power to someone else?

One of your most valuable tools is your unique writing voice. If you only strive to take on the flavor that others suggest, you’ll never develop your own. And creating your own voice means incorporating suggestions that make sense to you and putting aside the ones that don’t (no matter who they come from).

Remember: you own your writing. Don’t reject your own instincts and write a certain way just to appease others. Develop and hold onto your artistic vision. Balance suggestions from others with what you believe is best for your work. (Yes, writing - like life - is often all about balance.) Reject advice that doesn’t complement your personal vision.

Benefit of this temperament: If you are a tofu artist, you are spared the grueling decisions (complete with hair-pulling and hand-wringing) you see so many other writers grappling with. Since other people will give you that direction you seek, you can zip through first drafts much more quickly than other writers and then just work on incorporating what your critique group tells you.

Cost of this temperament: If your critique group includes more than two people (and to be the most effective, it should), what do you do when three people have three very different opinions on your work? How can you defer to them all? You can’t, of course, and this is where learning how to rely on your own instincts (you have them, even if you haven’t been paying attention) comes in. Then you can sift through the feedback and organize it in your own hierarchy.

The good news is that, even if you’re the staunchest of Tofu Artists, you can reshape your mindset and your habits so that you can hop off the treadmill and join the actual race. Nurture your own sense of intuition (even though you need outside feedback, learn to value your intuition above others’). Start to trust that inner voice you’ve been squeezing to the margins. Writing is a string of thousands of executive decisions. Practice making those decisions on your own and living with the results for a while, before you hand the piece off for critique.

(The other four writing temperaments (discussed in separate articles) are:

~Sir Starts-a-lot

~The Perfectionist

~Fool for a Deadline

~The Island.)

To discover more ways to make your writing habit more efficient, satisfying and fun visit ManuscriptRx and sign up for “Write Through It,” a free, monthly e-newsletter newsletter that offers practical writing advice and anecdotal wisdom.

Lucia Zimmitti, a writing coach and independent editor, is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Her fiction and poetry have been published in various national literary journals, and she has taught writing at the high school and college levels.

The number one problem most freelancers have is that their income is inconsistent. This makes it hard to plan. As a freelancer with some financial savvy, I’ve noticed some things that have helped me keep the debt monster at bay.

NOTE: Notice I wrote “at bay”; I haven’t completed escaped him, but he’s not an all-consuming threat either.

1. Get a job you hate: Why? A little story:

Jerry Seinfeld said that he sold light bulbs before he became rich and famous. He said he hated it, but he did it because it made him work that much harder on his comedy. His thinking was, “The sooner I succeed, the sooner I could give up selling light bulbs.

I thought this a brilliant concept.

Moral of this story: Complacency kills and this is kinda like reverse psychology. Imagine if you hated what you were doing. You’d work much harder to not have to do it and put every penny you earned towards the debt you owe so you could quit - as soon as possible.

2. Save ONLY $1,000: One of the things I learned from Dave Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, is to have an emergency fund.

Hold on, don’t tune out. This is not having 3-8 months of expenses in the bank, like most financial gurus will tell you. Dave says to start with $1,000. Why this amount, and why is it so radical?

When you hear, save 3-8 months of expenses, most of us turn a deaf ear. If you’re struggling just to keep up with the bills as they come in, putting $5,000, $10,000 or more away seems impossible.

But, most of us can imagine socking away a grand.

Mr. Ramsey’s theory is that it’s the little emergencies that cause us to constantly whip out the plastic and before we know it, we’re a few thousand in debt. He says, if you have an emergency fund of $1,000 and the transmission goes on your car, you won’t have to finance it with plastic.

You pay cash for it and therefore you haven’t created more debt at a time when you can least afford it - when things are going bad.

I’m a big believer in the universe talking to you. Some may call this presence God, Buddha, Allah; whatever you call it, I’m a big believer in a higher power. Around the time I read this, three things happened that added up to almost exactly a thousand dollars.

My car needed new rotors (I still don’t know what they are, but apparently my jeep was in bad need of them); my fiance’s car needed new tires and the thermostat in our house went kaput - in the dead of winter.

Now, we were lucky enough to be able to pay for all of this without charging any of it, but it didn’t come out of an emergency fund; it came right out of earned money, which really put a crimp in the holiday budget.

Moral of this story: Put away funds for Murphy’s law because when you least need something bad to happen, it will. Do this BEFORE you start paying off debt. Mr. Ramsey says it kind of inoculates you against ole man Murphy.

NOTE: There is a point where you do build up the 3-8 months of living expenses, but it comes later in his plan.

3. Chunk pay: What I mean by this is, when you get a chunk of money from a project, close your eyes, write out the check and just pay a darn bill.

I know from my own personal experience that when most of us get a chunk of money at one time, we want to treat ourselves a little, pay only what’s due (maybe a little more), and “save” a little.

The reason save is in quotation marks is because eventually that gets eaten up by those expenses that we can never seem to account for.

Another of Mr. Ramsey’s philosophies is that money you don’t have a plan for will find a way to leave you. So, if you know you’re getting a check in two weeks for $1,748.32 for a project you just completed, look over your bills and assign a debt to it. While it may bug you to do it, you’ll feel so much better once the check is in the mail.

Moral of this story: You can track where your money went; you can see the progress. This is important because when you remember that client who drove you bonkers and the project took you 8 more hours than you billed, at least you can say it was worth it because Visa is finally paid in full.

And you know what, I’ve taken on projects this year that in the past I would have passed on because I have a goal. Getting out of debt takes laser focus - and it gets addictive. But, since I’ve been on Dave Ramsey’s plan, I’ve made more progress in three months than I made all of last year - and I’m not THAT bad with money.

I’ve found that it’s those little things that get it in the way of success. By chunk paying, getting an emergency fund in place and doing jobs I don’t necessarily like, my debt-free goal is within reach - and yours can be too!

Yuwanda Black is a freelance SEO writer and the author of How to Make $250+/Day Writing Simple, 500-Word Articles. Ms. Black says, “You can work from home as a freelance writer in your PJs, getting assignments via the internet. I do it every day.”

Have you seen the commercial for the kid’s allergy medication? Two women are sitting in a park on a play date when one child runs up, sneezes, and both women, like gun slingers, pull out their emergency mommy medication. One mother has an oozing bag of mangled medications. The other mother pulls out her handy dandy pre-filled dose of medication and administers it to Junior and never misses a beat. Messy bag woman cowers in shame. Quick-dose mom flashes a condescending smile of victory.

Freeze the frame right here because I have a problem with this whole scenario. First of all, find me a park where children are frolicking and skipping to the tune of laughing mothers. Last park I went to, one kid pee’d on the slide, another bit his sister in the face, somebody found a hypodermic needle in the sand box, and my car got spray painted with gang graffiti before I even turned off the engine. And it’s not just moms anymore. I saw two dads, a grandparent, a babysitter, a kid who was thrown out the door of a station wagon as the parents ‘roll through’, another who I’m pretty sure lives there, and one man in slippers shuffling through the parking lot talking to himself. And who even has time for play dates anymore? I’m busy. My kid gets play dates in line at the DMV.

The TV moms are immaculately dressed. No wrinkles, no stains. Right now I’m wearing a t-shirt with crusted peanut butter and matching sweats that I’ve been wearing since Tuesday. I once went a whole day with a sucker stuck to the side of my head before anybody told me. The TV moms are chatting happily. Wrong. Sara’s telling Sue about how lazy her husband is; while Bertha (who just slipped vodka into her water bottle) is complaining about how far her butt has dropped to Erma who can’t hear her because she’s too busy spanking her kid in the parking lot.

The commercial mothers are always deep in conversation while their kids are playing out on the horizon. Hello! Do you watch Law and Order? My child once disappeared behind a bush for a second and I started screaming, clawing at my sweater, and profiling the other moms. And what’s up with the kid who comes up to his mother to sneeze? Please. My son can be bleeding out his eyes and he won’t stop digging to come get help. Commercial mom whips out her bag of medications. We went on vacation and I forgot Junior’s inhaler. She reaches into her purse and locates the bag of medicine immediately. I once went into my purse for a band aid and dug up four half-eaten candy bars, a pair of underwear, and a dead gerbil. No band aid.

Commercial kid takes his medication with a smile. I have to wrestle my kid to the ground, hold his nose, and threaten to take away Christmas if he doesn’t take it. Commercial kid smiles and gives a cute toothless thank-you while my kid seeks vengeance with a magic marker on the living room wall. Then Patty Perfect gives Susie Slack a condescending smile of victory. Well, I must admit, that one is pretty much on target. I’ve met Patty Perfect before. She’s the one who frowns when I bring chocolate when it’s my turn for preschool snack. When I put diet coke in his sippy cup. When I breastfeed at the salad bar.

Yeah - all that from a commercial. I’ll probably still buy it anyway. It does look cool. I’m sure it will cost three times as much, I’ll leave it at home, and my kid still won’t take it. So maybe the commercial wins after all. But I won’t let them tell me what normal mothers look like. Or what beautiful looks like either. Or success. Or happiness. What do they know?

Kelly Swanson, Humorist - Powerful Message, Outrageously Funny. Visit Kelly at  kellyswanson.net .

kelly@kellyswanson.net