Can I Write For A Living?

Motivation

2012-01-27T08:25:00.000Z

I'm making one of these for myself this weekend. The subject writers most commonly write about is probably procrastination. There are a million reasons not to write. Some of mine currently are; the 40 hour a week job that I need to pay for the wedding, the wedding (organising invites, sorting hotels for the family, blah, blah), not spending so much time in front of the laptop and more with my

Practice, Practice, Practice

2012-01-10T08:56:00.001Z

This man has been hitting the keys HARD If you read sites about or devoted to writing, they all say that you've got to practice. As I've been scratching around for a new years resolution, practice is mine. There's been a month between this blog post and the last. That doesn't feel good enough, especially when I know that people are returning again and again to read the blog (Blogger stats

City Olympic Heroes

2011-12-11T16:37:00.003Z

I've been pretty happy this week. Getting your name on the cover of a magazine will do that for you (it's the small stuff you can't read in the red ink). It feels like another step in the right direction - if someone had told me that I'd get a cover byline a couple of years ago when I started writing it would certainly have instilled some belief. The feature came to me the way I hope all

140 Characters

2011-11-09T20:38:00.000Z

I've written before about Chris Floyd's '140 Characters' but that was before it had that title. Previously it was his 'Portwit' project. Chris social life had shrunk as the technological advances in his profession progressed. Before he knew it, he was conversing more with people on Twitter than with some of his oldest friends. So he set out to meet them, photograph them and find out what they

What Kind of Writer Should You Be?

2011-10-30T09:36:00.000Z

The answer to this is, of course, whatever kind of writer you want to be. When I started, I didn't really have much interest in news. I looked at headlines, without thinking about them very much and then decided I wasn't interested. Take today's BBC home page for example. 'Armed guards to protect UK ships'. Ok, there are pirates off the coast of Mogadishu - I know that and I don't care. Let

It's OK to say 'No'

2011-09-13T07:40:00.000+01:00

In order to write for a living, you'd better be writing, which is something I haven't been doing a whole lot of recently. Worse, I've been turning down opportunities to write. 'Why, you doughnut?' you might entirely reasonably ask. There are two reasons; the first is I don't have the time and the second is that I don't have the interest. The first reason is the most galling. Travel writing

Reasons to Write - Luxury, Challenge and Freedom

2011-08-07T17:38:00.001+01:00

It's happy week here at CIWFAL as my cup has been somewhat overflowing of late. If you're looking for reasons to write, this is the post for you. Writing has brought many new experiences (not least interviewing Jazzie B) but the last month has been something of a succession of gifts. It's been like being courted. First up there was the press trip to Costa Navarino in Greece for the Daily Mail

The Great Twitter Portwit Project

2011-07-17T11:58:00.000+01:00

The photographer Chris Floyd has made a great film about his Twitter Portwit project. I think I've written before on here about how the nature of friendship is changing due to Facebook and Twitter. Chris is very articulate on the subject - if you click the headline above you can read about his reasons for investigating. Whether you think Twitter is 'A huge free-flowing endless conversation with

The Hamster Wheel of Procrastination

2011-06-27T21:39:00.000+01:00

The truth is, I'm nowhere near writing for a living. As much as I'd like it to finance my life, writing is more like a hobby for the time being. I've got financial commitments; I've got rent to pay, I've got a wedding to save for and London is an expensive city. Even going out for a pint these days burns a hole in your pocket. So what I do for the sake of a regular wage, five days a week, is

Out of My Box

2011-05-29T18:50:00.001+01:00

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Before I started writing, my inbox only ever contained two types of emails: those from friends and junk. No I didn't want to apply for Dogshit University in the States, no I didn't think a credit card with 27% APR was an attractive proposal and no I didn't want to buy some super erection guaranteeing blue pills that couldn't be

Bad Mood Rising

2011-04-27T21:10:00.001+01:00

A couple of sunny Saturdays ago, the Mrs and I caught up with some friends who we hadn't seen for a while. The sun was out and we were heading for Syon Park for a picnic and this is usually the sort of thing that makes me happy; some good conversation with people I love, the chance to pig out on food, some booze and the sun warm on my skin. The only problem was that I was in a funk. Down days

Pass Me On (and other news)

2011-03-19T13:10:00.001Z

It's very difficult to write around a 40 hour week job. What with trying to spend quality time with the love of your life, the gym (for the knee - nearly there now), seeing friends and the temptations of Twitter, the pub and TV, you really have to fight hard to be imaginative and creative. A blunt person might say that my priorities demonstrate how much I actually do want to write for a living

Writing and Not Writing

2011-03-01T14:05:00.000Z

Stretch before working out. Even when I'm not really writing, I'm writing. Twittering, emailing, commenting on other blogs. Every day my fingers are on the keys in some respect. And even though I'm trying to hold down a non-writing 9-5 in order to pay for a few things (like a wedding), I'm trying to keep the writing going. The first thing is a new project for a not so new year. It sprang

15 minutes with Danielle Lineker

2011-02-10T16:48:00.000Z

Calm down it's not that kind of 15 minutes - she's a married woman for God's sake. I met Danielle at a photo shoot a few weeks ago and I thought she was cool - friendly and unaffected. So I asked her PR if I could interview her. For those of you who don't read the tabloids, Danielle's surname was once Bux and she was a model. Then she met and married Gary Lineker, who, before he was on Match

New Adventures in Sound

2011-01-29T14:02:00.003Z

One of the advantages of the Itunes supermarket (other download sites are available, as Shaun Keaveny might say) is that we're no longer tied to purchasing whole albums in the hope of musical satisfaction. So many times in the past I'd invested hopefully, willing an album to be another 'Blue Lines' 'Stone Roses' or 'Stories From the City', good from start to finish. It rarely happened, too many

CIWFAL v 40before30

2011-01-10T08:34:00.001Z

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; Does someone who writes a blog usually interview one of their followers? Once we were both on Twitter, I noticed that Jayne was always tweeting from glamorous foreign locations and I wondered how, a little jealously, she could afford to be gallivanting around so much. We met up on a freezing night in Islington in a coffee bar, having had to abandon the pub we'd

Let's Go Round Again

2010-12-24T08:55:00.000Z

One last chance to get the fingers on the keys before I get away to see my family. A couple more presents to buy, a train ride and then three days of reacquaintance. At this time of year I always find myself weighing up how the year has gone for me. In terms of the blog, I got my question answered - I can't write for a living. Perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough. But for all that it was a

Sociable Networking

2010-12-08T22:09:00.001Z

As much as I gripe about always having to look at a screen (monitor at work, Iphone on the tube, TV if I'm weak when I get home) one positive thing about social networking is, if you want to, you can get to meet some of the people that like your stuff. In the case of @40before30, she started following this blog, then I started following her on Twitter and the other night we got to have a drink

Buy my friend's book

2010-11-30T08:19:00.001Z

I go to the Marylebone Writers Group on a Monday night. Someone reads 3 pages of their work and then everyone else offers constructive criticism. One of our lot has only gone and got herself into print so this week the blog is given over to her. As well as being good enough to publish, she's obviously also some kind of marketing whiz - she's got 450 bloggers, mates, whatevers helping her to do

Carping Contemplation or Money, Money, Money

2010-11-16T09:03:00.000Z

Big gap since the last post - I've found it hard to write, to have ideas, as it's been a gloomy month. I wish I had something insightful to share with you but if you read on, this is more of a personal post than usual by way of explaining why I haven't written here in the last few weeks. It's a lot to do with the writing too though. The operation I had on my leg on 16th September coincided

Platform for a Good Mood

2010-10-17T18:46:00.000+01:00

I've been feeling a bit down recently and when that happens its a godsend when you find something to cheer you up. The feature that put a smile on my bleeding miserable fizzog was some sage advice on how to have a long term relationship. It's very wise, honest and funny. By the time you get to the end you almost envy the understanding he has with his other half. There's loads of good features

Who are you (and where are you from)?

2010-10-01T14:24:00.000+01:00

Blogger has a tab that I've only recently discovered called Stats - I'll admit to being a bit slow on the uptake. I was relying on Google Analytics for a while but for some reason its stopped recording traffic and I'm not enough of a nerd to work out how I can fix it. Initially that was depressing as I thought absolutely everyone (even mates) had deserted the blog but then I was getting

Perfect Pitch and Porno Post

2010-09-24T12:04:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd start this week by bigging up a couple of other good writers out there. Of particular interest to all you magazine people should be Pitching the World. He's strayed off the subject a bit, but the original idea was to pitch ideas to all 642 magazines in the Writers and Artists Yearbook. Along the way there has been alcoholism and the breakdown of his relationship, none of which

Knocked Up

2010-09-03T16:34:00.001+01:00

It was impossible to relax until this thing was done. In Ghana, there's a lot of hanging around and time weighs heavy on your mind. To make our engagement official in the eyes of her family, my fiance Karen had arranged for us to have a traditional 'knocking' ceremony, in which the groom (me) formally asks for the

Coverlines and Moral Dilemmas

2010-08-18T19:13:00.001+01:00

I inadvertently got married since I last posted. My partner and I has asked to do something to mark our engagement with her family before we travelled to Ghana a couple of weeks back. We were going out there to join in the celebrations for her grandmother's 100th birthday. Bit of an eye-opener for me in a couple of ways - I'd never been to West Africa before and I got to meet more members of

Commissions, Connections and Canine Affection

2010-07-26T13:27:00.001+01:00

Haweswater Lake. And some sheep and rain. July has been busy. First the good stuff. I got another commission out of the Express after the Peak District travel piece I wrote for them - this time I had to write about the Olympics and it should be appearing tomorrow as it will be two years until the Games begin. Hedge magazine commissioned me to write a feature about crowd funding, for

Peaks and Troughs - slight return

2010-06-27T11:33:00.001+01:00

You've got to love England in the summertime, right? Absolute smasher of a day this sunny Sunday and I've woken up to my first national newspaper byline (page 79 of the Sunday Express today). It's the travel feature about the Peak District that I wrote about in the original 'Peaks and Troughs' post on this blog. It's a good feeling - feels like I'm getting somewhere. More importantly it part

Fear and Loafing

2010-06-23T11:14:00.000+01:00

As a freelancer, one of the things I'm finding hard to learn is knowing when I can enjoy time off. The whole point of being your own boss is that you can work when you want to, right? Only true if you're in the happy position of being offered so much work you can pick and choose...and maybe not even then. Most freelancers would agree that you take the work when its coming your way. Enjoy

The Trouble With Women

2010-06-03T07:08:00.002+01:00

Sometimes its suggested to me that I should write something for a certain section (not generally by commissioning editors unfortunately). A journalist who I met last year was kind enough to tell me that she'd enjoyed reading something on here and that I should write something for 'The Trouble With Women...' which is a section in the Times Style magazine. Eva, this one's for you. No feedback

Peaks and Troughs

2010-05-12T15:29:00.000+01:00

After weeks of posting examples of writing on this blog, I thought it was about time I returned to the original question. Make sense wouldn’t it? Currently the answer is, I’m starting to. There have now been 4 commissions. Might seem like a small number to you but to me, each one is a little episode of joy. It means someone out there thinks I’m good enough at writing to pay me for it. I’ve

LCD Soundsystem, Brixton Academy, 24th May 2010

2010-04-27T22:15:00.001+01:00

Did you do a

Hungover on a sunny day

2009-08-19T11:40:00.003+01:00

The BBC says it might hit 30 degrees today. Just time to keep my hand in with this blog before going out into the sunshine. I'm meeting a mate in Kensington Gardens for lunch before heading over to the Daily Express building for a quick meeting with the Deputy Travel Editor Duncan Craig. I met Duncan last year in an airship of all things. At the time Stella Artois were taking journalists for

Travel Writing Workshop

2009-08-02T17:44:00.002+01:00

Saturday at the Indian YMCA in Fitzroy Square at a travel writing workshop with Peter Carty, a freelance travel writer. I went more out of curiosity than an obsessive desire to be a travel writer and Peter revealed the path in a very orderly and knowledgeable fashion. For me the fun part was the challenges he set us. After his words on 'avoiding cliches' he asked us to write a description of a

In the Thirties

2009-06-30T11:22:00.003+01:00

Its hot in the library today. Its an old one on Ladbroke Grove and air conditioning is the last thing that would suit it. Instead the windows are open and the roar of traffic passing down the Grove is the background to my blogging, along with the whoops and screams of the kids in the school next door. They're probably going mad because of the sun and the heat. Hopefully we're in for a cracker

John and Struan and David

2009-06-12T10:00:00.002+01:00

'It's not what you know, it's who you know' is often repeated in media. Though there are many talented people out there, a lot of work often comes through good relationships. For example, I didn't expect to get a lead when I popped out to get some paint for the walls of my flat last Saturday. A former colleague had told me that he was often in the Prince Bonaparte on Chepstow Road and

Rejection...

2009-06-04T17:50:00.003+01:00

OK, time to name some more of the good guys. Two more replies, but unfortunately two more rejections. However, the 'at least they got back to me' awards go to Lydia Williams, who writes for The Resident, Grove and NW (lydia.williams@archant.co.uk) and secondly Liz Hunt, who writes for The Telegraph (Elizabeth.Hunt@telegraph.co.uk). It is disheartening getting rejections so to try and put off

A small Internet success

2009-05-28T09:00:00.001+01:00

Click here

Post Bank Holiday Tap Ups

2009-05-26T18:47:00.005+01:00

The sun hits our living room around 7pm showing up how dirty the windows are. Rain was lashing down on them through the night and this morning and you'd think this would clean 'em up but not in London. City rain is so skanky. Martin Deeson, who writes for GQ among other notables, posted on Facebook today that he was wondering where all the freelance work had gone so things must be bad. Those

Chasing for answers

2009-05-22T14:54:00.000+01:00

When I was a Photo Editor, I used to regularly get emails from lots of people wanting work. Because of the sheer number I would only reply if one of them really struck me. Some photographers, agencies and PRs would follow their emails up with phone calls to check I'd seen it, at which point I'd scroll through my inbox, wondering if I'd deleted it. At any one point, even with deleting about 100

The Reason for this Blog's existence

2009-05-21T17:56:00.000+01:00

Here's what happened. About 10 years ago I decided that I would quite like to write for a living. I fluked a job working for a magazine on the photo desk and thought that was a way in; that once I was there I would be able to switch roles. What happened was that after learning the ropes on the photo desk for a year my boss left and they asked me to take her job as Photo Editor. Given that I