The Freelance Writers Den and great tips on how to write better.

These past weeks  I have been quite busy with two writing projects as well as with reading blog posts of successful freelancers and trying to figure out how I can one day become one of them. While I was hanging out over at linked-in groups, someone suggested me to join the Freelance Writer's Den. I visited the website, but it did not accept more members at the time. It seemed like some sort of private coaching club and promised to help writers get out of content mills and into real -well payed- writing.

Not being a native speaker and not having a literature background, I knew that for me just chatting with native writers would be beneficial, so I decided to register and wait until there would be a spot for new members. I had nothing to lose anyway.

So today I received a mail that there was a free spot for me and I got quite excited about it. I also had a bit of beginner's luck, because just four hours after my registration a live writing improvement lab with English professor Ben Yagoda started. I did not know who he is before this virtual writing lab, but I sure am happy that I tuned in. 

Ben and Carol gave quite a few useful tips on how to improve your writing both on- and off- line and I have to say that there are quite a few things that I have been doing wrong (and am still doing wrong in this post, because they did not have time to sink it, but I observe them as I write). I will list a few of these tips here, but I do encourage new freelancers to try and join the Den.

Tips from the Ben-Carol lab

-Watch out for word repetition. The more common a word it, the more you can get away with repeating it. But if you are repeating "velociraptor" in a sentence, people are going to notice. And are not going to like it.

-Do not use too many parenthesis. Or double dashes (God, I love double dashes! Oh, and I just used a parenthesis...).

-Be yourself but not too much. A personal style is good, but if your personal style is all about parenthesis, semicolons and dashes, well, restrict your self for the sake of your readers.

-And since I mentioned semicolons, Ben says that very few people know how to use them right, so unless you are sure why you use them, don't. That did hurt my feelings, I have to confess. 

-If you are aware that you abuse a word, then visit wordcounter.com, copy your text in it and let it inform you how far your abuse has gone.

-Read your text out loud, in order to figure out if your sentences are too long. If you need to stop to take a breath before the end of the sentence, it is way too long. Cut it.

-Cut "that" out. We tend to use it as a filler word way too much.

-Prepositions are the weakest part of speech, so if you want to create a strong sentence, keep prepositions to a minimum and do not end the sentence with a preposition.

-It is better to reserve "whom" for very formal texts and use who/ to who in other types of writing. 

-If you are trying to have your own recognizable writing style, avoid cliches as much as possible

-Do not abuse abbreviations and quotation marks

-When the gender is unknown, you can use “they/their” instead of “he/she” or “his/hers”

-Don't use underlining online, because it comes across as a link. Use italics or bold instead.

-When writing online, keep it short. Short phrases, short paragraphs, short texts. The eyes get tired when reading on the screen much faster than when reading on paper.

-Do not punctuate based on sound. This will only lead to commas being totally misplaced.

-Read edited prose in order to absorb some of the above mentioned rules. Keep in mind that most of the times bogs are unedited, so do not have them as your only source of input and inspiration.

-“There are” can usually be omitted, leading to a shorter and more elegant phrase.

-Here you can find britishisms :)

Now, let's see how long it will take me until I started implementing those precious little tips.

How to make a sharpie mug and clean copper jewels

Sharpie Mug

Some times the time for crafting is really limited. Still, there is time for mini projects, like this sharpie mug. All you need to do is find an awesome design (I stole mine from here), buy a cheap mug and draw the design on it with a permanent marker (or sharpie). Then, you put the mug in the oven and bake it for 30 minutes at about 200 Celsius. Once the 30' have passed, you open the oven door slightly and you let the mug cool in the oven. If you take it out immediately, it might crack. The cheaper the mug, the better. A cheap mug means a cheap enamel that will melt fast and absorb the ink, while the mug is hot. Super cool China porcelain stuff is just to good to work on this project. It is supposed to be dishwasher safe, but I do not have one, so I wouldn't know about that.


Cleaning Copper Jewels

The second "how to" has to do with copper jewelery. I wrote a few articles 3 months ago about fashion and style and the like, which really hurt my self esteem. I always thought I had an athletic body, but it seems that I am what people would call a boy-ish figure, or "the ruler" or "the stick". In other words, skinny, no curves. "Athletic" sounded much better. Anyway, apart from that, I also found out that people can find which clothes suit them, based on their skin tone. Here is a sample of one of the articles I read to write my own back then. I found this color analysis thing pretty creepy, but anyway, what I learned is that I am a "Soft Autumn" and that my skin has a yellow undertone, thus I should year jewelery with warm tones in them, meaning gold, copper and leather.

Coincidentally, my partner has given to me as a gift a few months ago a necklace with a small copper tag with three animals etched on it, which I love and wear every day. I do take it off when I shower, but it has become quite blunt over the months, so today I decided to clean it. It turns out that copper shines again if you submerge your jewels in lemon juice/ ketchup/ vinegar and you leave them there for 10 to 20 minutes. Then you can use a toothbrush, to clear them better and wash them with soap. You pat-dry with a towel and they are as good as new!  Just make sure that they are fully submerged, otherwise you will end up with jewels with spots with different tones.

Some Linked-In stuff

On a side note, linked-in proves to be the most valuable networking site, now that I am trying to connect with other writers and freelancers (hi Nena and Sharon :) ). I absolutely encourage anyone out there who wants to work freelance to seek out for such communities, ask for help and give their two cents to the group discussions that are going on.

That's all for tonight :)

A fairy tale and some doodles (or: Saturday Night Creative Fever)

So, the fun duo that we are, we decided to spend yet one more Saturday night crafting (me) and composing music (N.). I had made the cut-outs that you see in the pictures quite a few days before, but we did not want to film the little video without a good camera and music. The camera part got solved with my brother's present and for the music we found some in-between solutions, recording with the lap-top and doing some juggling with midi files (I have no clue about those things, N. did it all).

Did the videos turn out perfect? No way. Do they please us and record efficiently our ideas? Totally. You see, these videos are kind of a sketch book, much more than complete works, and I find it absolutely necessary to take notes, in whatever form, of your ideas. Everything finds its place eventually.

You can see them here and here.

"Shadows" is the story of a girl who loved a boy without a heart (and that is literal, in this case), so she is struggling to find a way to become one with him. There is a witch involved as well as magical potions, transformations and the like.

The "happy days" one has a sense of longing, if you ask me. I mean, you see all those happy colors and the smiling creatures on the planet being created as the video goes on, but somehow -and the music has a lot to do with it- you feel that as fast as they were created, they will be gone. It is more like a memory of happy days. Also, I find the part where the rainbow is drawn very relaxing and I am considering making a video just recording such moves, for purely relaxing purposes.

Highlight of the weekend: there was SUN! And we went for a walk to the central square of Delft, where N. got to ask his favorite street musician what is this waltz he keeps playing. It turned out it was his own compositions. We sat at the foot of the statue, listening to his wonderful accordion music and soaking sun and looking at the rooftops and pigeons for half an hour or so and it was a tiny bit as if we were in Paris.

Valentine's, Ballantine's, great music, great movies and hard negotiations

To be completely honest, there was no Ballantine's in our Valentine's celebrations, but I liked the pun too much not to put it in the title. And anyway, if you do not have a Valentine, at least you can have a Ballantine.

The menu

We did have wine though and a meal that included mushroom soup with shiitake and white mushrooms, roasted sweet potatoes and red skin potatoes, sugar snap peas with an olive oil sauce, rocket salad with cherry tomatoes and my greatest pride of all, the fruit tart pictured above. As I have mentioned before, it is not that easy to stay original when cooking vegan and I did not want to make chocolate truffles, chocolate brownies, chocolate tart or chocolate muffins yet one more time. So what I did was a tart with soy vanilla cream, blueberries, raspberries and almonds, topped with a blueberry syrup caramel. We ate 7 bowls of soup the two of us and more than half of the tart, so I consider the cooking a success.

The music

Yesterday AFP (stands for Amanda F*cking Palmer), released the video for her "Bed Song". I was really excited and full of anticipation until I saw it. Well, I have to admit that I preferred the song without the video. It's not that it is a bad video. It is great and it visualizes the lyrics well. A bit too accurately for my taste though. I prefer my imaginary video. When I first listened to the song I cried because of the deep truth of what it describes. You can read the lyrics here. Luckily, I have examples of love that turned from passion to deep care and tenderness and it just lasted forever. My parents. My grandparents. Friends of my parents. But I also have so many examples of people just drifting apart due to bad communication. And it is yet more cruel when you do love the other person but the wall of silence has become so high that you cannot jump over it anymore.

Anyway, great song. Go listen to it and make sure that it does not end up describing your life.

The second song that we came across was Two of Us, by The Beatles. I am a John fan, my partner is a Paul fan, for the record. Did Paul write it for John? Did he right it for Linda? Well, nobody knows but it is a great song about love and friendship (and a couple more things) anyway. A cover was also in the soundtrack of "I am Sam". Watch this movie. It does have a happy ending but until it gets there, oh man...

The movies

After dinner we chain-watched two movies. The one was Before Sunset. We have watched Before Sunrise a few weeks ago and were amazed, so we thought we should go for this one as well. The Boy has written a great album inspired by Before Sunrise, by the way, so if you are into his music, go listen to it. Do not let the cover scare you away. In these two movies Richard Linklater makes you re-visit your life and gives you a preview of what your future could look like -at least if you are around 30. I watched these two movies for the first time when I was 18 and I found them absolutely uninteresting. Its basically two people walking through beautiful European cities. Whatever.

And then, I watched them almost 10 years later and -bam!- I got it all. It was as if Linklater has been stalking me and my brainwaves and spit out all my thoughts and emotions in one movie in Before Sunrise. And in before Sunset, he summed up all my fears, hopes, thoughts, hesitations and reflections of my life as it is now. Now we are just counting days until 2013.

The second movie we watched was Morvern Callar. I first watched it also when I was 18, but this one really shook my world. I remember going to a video club back in 2003 and not knowing what to pick. And I liked the cover, so I got this one, with the ridiculously translated title "Life, a journey". There is a writer, there is friendship, there is death, there is Velvet Underground. This is the movie that introduced me to Velvet Underground and also this crazy song. Amazing soundtrack and characters and Samantha Morton as Morvern Callar, making all the crazy stuff that I did as a freshman in University seem totally reasonable and justified. 

I remembered this movie because of a post in the website of some friends, were it was discussed how so many great movies have rating under 7 in imdb. No one mentioned Morvern there, but I remembered being shocked when I saw its rating after I had watched the film. People, please do not pay attention to imdb ratings. Watch this movie. Watch whatever movie looks like it could resonate with you somehow.

Also, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton = Major girl crushes.

The day after (negotiations)

Unfortunately, the day after Valentine's did not start that pleasantly as I had to talk with a real estate agent that owes us money as well as the person who kicked us out of an apartment because of our pets. You can read the story here (A rabbit, a hedgehog and a slight change of plans). 
Briefly, we rented a house and the day that we were supposed to sleep there for the first time and the agent came to give us the key, we realized that pets are not allowed, not even non-barking/meowing pets. This led to us giving back the keys and finding a new house a day before New Year's Eve. Still, they did not give us our money back. They said we would get it once they would find a new tenant. 1.5 months later, this has not happened.

Thankfully, we have friends that are informed about the Dutch legislation and pointed us towards legal services and tenant protection committees. So I informed the agent that now "guess what, we know what you do is illegal" and somehow her attitude changed a bit. We really hope that the owner will conform with our suggestions and we won't have to take further steps. 

As crazy as that sounds, I feel that those challenges make us stronger and more capable of dealing with injustices. And with immigration waves becoming more and more apparent in The Netherlands and Germany, I do expect things to become less easy for foreigners, especially considering the fact that unemployment is rising even within the native population. I have seen it happen in my own country and it does not look pretty, I have to say. 

The work

Work-wise, I feel really lucky to be busy with quite a few projects. Small ones, definitely not that well-payed, but some of them quite fulfilling. I designed Mia Simon's new book cover these last days and it turned out pretty neat. I also did a layout where I was allowed -and encouraged, to be honest- to use some Dada typography style bits and that was a lot of fun. Of course the usual content writing that pays the rent took place as well and that might not be so fulfilling, but it is still a pleasant challenge to try and come up with 10 different articles for the same keyword. 

Also, within the next two weeks, a book that I am ghost-writing will finish and after that I am thinking on sticking to smaller projects so that at least during the weekend I can focus on my own writing. We will see if that works out...

An early Valentine's day present

The Love

Today has been a good day and the weekend has been a great weekend.
What you see in the picture above is me blaming one of my 4 best friends in the whole world (that's including my partner) that she killed my productivity with her present.
She bought me this amazing set of rubber stamps, complete in a beautiful tin case, with a tin full of ink as well.

Now I have to stamp the whole Universe. It shall never stop.

What is even greater about it, is why she bought me the gift. Where she comes from, Valentine's day is a day to celebrate all your loved ones, not just your lover. Which I find a great idea. So she came today at our weekly coffee meeting, holding this cute-beyond-words package with a card filled with lovely words that I am going to keep for myself.

After I came back home, I got to skype with another one of the holly trinity of my girlfriends (the two have never met the third one) and amuse her with all the extra costs that came with our new house, such us municipality fees, a fine about misplacing garbage and other not so great ways to spend your money.  Laughing about this sort of stuff with your friends always makes it seem a bit better.

The Fun

Now, about the weekend... We met our neighbors and it was a great surprise when we realized that they are a couple of a PhD student and a freelance translator. What are the chances? They are also non-Dutch, but not Greek either, which is great, because we get to add yet more different cultures to our group of friends. They also have the sweetest baby I have ever seen, but I admit that until a year ago babies were just noise producing machines in my eyes, so I did not pay much attention to them.

So our new neighbors joined our housewarming party vol.2, along with my old housemate, my best friend mentioned above and my old house owner with her husband. We were a group of Finish, Korean, Australian, American, German and Greek people who somehow got along really well. And the house definitely feels warmer now. We started out with a plant-based dinner, that I am quite proud of, because you can only cook that many vegan dinners without repeating yourself. And then we drank a few (or not so few) wines. I believe we went to sleep around four o'clock in the morning, which is something I have not done since ages and quite enjoyed it. Sunday got wasted though.


The Work

Today, I had the chance to make some edits to a book that I am ghost-writing, after a great feedback that I got. I love it when feedback is to the point and does not leave you lost and wondering what you should do. Instead, this client is very positive, appreciates the work that I do and gives clear comments on the changes they feel I should make. From what I hear, I have been very lucky so far, getting clients who are reasonable, leave me creative space and pay on time. I cross my fingers that it will continue to be this way. Not that it has all been ideal, but I have decided not to let minor issue compromise my enthusiasm.

For this week, the plan is to write-write-write, plus design a cover for a book, in which my name gets to show up next to "illustrator:". Not bad. Not bad at all!

About (not) being an expert; about good people; about a shop

This has been quite an interesting day. First of all, I was too busy (and too lazy) to cook, which led into me being kept alive by consuming coffee-dipped cookies. Now, here is an important tip: pick mugs that are at least as wide as your favorite cookies and keep a spoon near-by, because only real experts can enjoy coffee-dipped cookies without ending up with a muddy cookie sludge at the bottom of their mug.

The (not) being an expert part

Secondly, I wrote 5 articles with some relation to interior design for some Asian country (I am ghost-writing, so I shall not reveal more details) and I came across a few articles about why you should not hesitate to write about anything, even though you are not an expert. Here is one of them. They key point is that you do not need to be THE expert in order to do content writing. You just need to be one step ahead than your editor and your readers. And this can be achieved with a bit of conscious googling, for most subjects.

Nutrition, fashion, relationships, tech-trends, music, alternative healing, all sorts of products are just some of the topics that you can write about without holding a degree. I have written a series of articles about foreclosures in Albuquerque and I had no clue where that was. I had to find out though. A few weeks later we watched "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", Albuquerque was mentioned and I realized I knew everything about its real estate market. Funny life.

The good people part

On a side note, I feel like the luckiest sister in the world, because my brother, even though younger, earns enough to be able to afford the equipment that I need for my job and loves me enough to buy me said equipment. So this pic was taken with my brand new Logitech HD 1080p high definition camera that he bought me. As he wrote in his e-mail "Please stop using up the valuable space of cyber-space by uploading videos that you attempted to make by plugging in your laptop potatoes/loafers/etc. Buy a decent camera". And he funded it and he had also already done the research on what I should buy. What can I say, I am grateful.

The "good people" part of the title refers also to the freelancers that I come across online (in LinkedIn and various blogs), that are willing to give valuable advice to a newbie like me. A wise advice that I got today was that, advice is important no matter whom it comes from. You need of course to take into consideration if the person who offers you advice has used it for themselves, but you do not need to start thinking if they have the right degrees/years of experience/ background/age/gender/and what not. Being open and critical at the same time is what matters.

The shop part

In my website, I have an e-shop where I sell my designs. Until I become famous though, it is not that likely that someone is going to google "Has Alexia of "Alexia's Writings and Designs" designed anything that I can buy?" and find my shop. Hence I decided to create a shop over at Storenvy.com. Communities always work best for this sort of stuff. I designed my banner and background image and the like today and I will start uploading stuff really soon.

My job is to keep you posted.

Your job is to stay tuned.

Deer and Hunters

This is our newest video. If you read the description, you might be a bit confused, so let me explain.

The last few days in my homeland, Greece, dark things are happening.
Yesterday we were reading all the announcement on the news, blogs and articles about the publication of the pictures of four suspects of a robbery. Normally, pictures of people who have not been convicted are never published, as a measure to protect their privacy and safety and their families. Additionally, we have never seen in the press the faces of policemen who have been convicted for murders or the faces of neo-nazis who have been convicted for killing legal immigrants in cold blood. 

Two days ago though, the Greek police decided to publish the pictures of four young men, aged 20 to 24, who are accused of the robbery in Velvento (Kozani, Greece). The reasoning was that they are also suspects for being members of a radical/terrorist (according to the police) group that Greek police has been after for a while. The photographs of those men were all manipulated in photoshop in such a way that it was more than apparent that police tried to cover up the severe beat up that they have undergone.

I am copying here the Guardian article: (The public order minister, Nikos Dendias, said that) "the use of Photoshop methods was necessary to ensure the suspects were "recognisable"". What more can we say about the violation of human rights?

Police is trying to justify the beating by claiming that it happened while they were trying to catch the group. There is video footage however that clearly shows that the members of the group were not beaten at the time of their arrest. It seems that it all happened later on and that they were tortured while kept in the police offices. They were not allowed medical examinations, even though they have apparent signs of having been beaten on the head. They were also not allowed to contact their parents for a long period of time.

The young members of the groups believe that they are fighting a just fight against a corrupted government and they see themselves as a revolutionary group and not as a terrorist organization. I am not going to say if their deeds are justified or not, because they have not gone to trial for them yet and they are not convicted.

What struck me though, was that one of the four, N.Romanos, was a very close friend of Alexandros Grigoropoulos,  the 15 year old student who got shot and killed by a police officer in December 2008. Romanos was there that night, with Grigoropoulos. I can not wrap my mind around how I would have felt if police killed an innocent friend of mine with no reason at all. I cannot imagine what I would have turned into, but I am sure it would not be pretty. Does that justify any violent action? No. Does that explain why Romanos became an active member of the anarchist movement and sees himself as a prisoner of war? For me, yes, it does. I clearly remember back in 2008 trying to grasp how the friends of this kid must have felt, how they would grow up, how they would deal with this system that occasionally kills civilians instead of protecting them.

This video we made is dedicated to their friendship. It's all about the dark and tragical and dramatic elements that surround it. It's all about the violence that provokes yet more violence. (The hunter kills the father of the deer. The wolf eats the hunter.). But most of all it is about the infinite sadness of loosing your loved one and having to go on with your life (same way that the doe has to feed the deer).

Laundry (or: sleep is overrated)

The funny thing about creativity is that it strikes when you are at your busiest. There are deadlines ahead of me for three projects, I write the whole day, yet around 9 o'clock at night I get this itchy feeling at the center of my palms and I absolutely need to draw.

And Nikos absolutely needs to write music for what I draw.

And this is how we ended up sleeping at 4:00 in the morning yesterday (which practically means today).

We are absolute amateurs, in the sense that I am just making drafts and trying new techniques and Nikos has no proper recording equipment. However, we are being loyal to the spirit of "Perfection is Dull" and prefer to try many things and see what works best, instead of being perfectionists and never completing something, because it will never be good enough.

Today we woke up quite late, went for a coffee and I bought a few new markers, an x-acto knife and embossing tools. I have never used embossing before, so now I am all about trying it instead of doing the useful stuff that earns the money to buy the pretty stuff.

Friday Night Creative Fever

We live on the busiest party street of Delft (yes, there is such a thing).
While drunk students and teenagers are yelling at each other under our window, we decided to get creative and make a little something.

You can check it out here.

I am currently experimenting with new things and even though it is a very rough draft, I wanted to share and get some feedback. My partner was kind enough to write a great piano piece, inspired by the illustration.

You can also see the scans of the drawings (no photoshop, no filters. Perfection is Dull.)