Archive for 2006
I’m not an e-commerce diva, nor do I play one on TV. (Though I did interview several interesting e-tailers for my book, including the women behind Supermaggie and Diva Deals.)
In the past week, I’ve attended a couple craft shows, one at the holiday fundraiser for this fine nonprofit organization, as well as this weekend-long craftacular event. And now I’m even more impressed and in awe of anyone who can make a full-time living selling their handmade wares, online, in person, whenever and wherever.
I mean, all I do is sell words. I don’t have to buy things wholesale and spend hours assembling them and then hawking them in cyberspace or from the trunk of my car. (Though I will probably revise that statement in a couple months when my book is out.)
So if I ever wanted to become an e-tailer, I would soak up the ultra-informative suggestions that Grace Bonney of design*sponge makes on this week’s Slate BizBoxBlog, like a, er, sponge. There are about 101 suggestions in her latest column — how to track inventory, the cheapest/easiest ways to ship, how to give good customer service, and on and on and on. There’s also lots of advice on what not to do.
Even though I’m mainly a service provider, I relish hearing how this self-employed design diva makes a go of it and seeing that many sole proprietors and small business owners share the same concerns. Definitely an article worth bookmarking.
December 7th, 2006
I found this little nugget in Monday’s Seattle Times, in an article called “Gender Gap Narrows as Men’s Pay Erodes”:
…a noteworthy trend in the 21st-century economy: Women are closing in on men when it comes to wages, but not for the reasons anticipated — or hoped for — when gender pay equity became a rallying cry in the 1970s.
Data show that the pay gap has been narrowing not because women have made great strides, labor experts say, but because men’s wages are eroding.
Since I’m on deadline, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about how languishing wages are a drag for all workers and probably not what my mom had in mind in the seventies when she joined NOW and marched for the ERA. But don’t let me put words in your mouth or anything…
December 6th, 2006
I admit it. The Quality of Life Queen (moi) feels as though she’s spiraling out of control these days, between trying to earn a living with her commercial clients, trying to forge ahead with new (read: on spec) writing projects, and trying to promo her upcoming book. I mean, look how it’s got me referring to myself in the third person, which is endlessly creepy, not to mention annoying.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about freelance writers using virtual assistants to help ease their administrative workload. A few of the authors I interviewed when writing my book encouraged me to hire a researcher and/or transcriptionist. But I couldn’t afford to, so I filed that fantasy under Maybe Someday. Only now, too crazed to get to half the promo tasks I should be getting to, I see how having another pair of eyes and hands (or at least the ability to function on zero sleep) would be enormously helpful.
I do have one fabulous writer pal from Hedgebrook, Traci, who you will meet on this site in the coming days (for reasons you will soon be privy to), helping me a bit, which I so, so appreciate. She helped me with the last proof of my book pages, and she’s helping me line up some cool new posts for this here little blog. But Traci cannot help me forever. Traci has her own fabulous jetsetting life to live and her own writing to attend to. So I’m beginning to ponder the feasibility of hiring an ongoing virtual assistant (VA).
Since I know nothing about these mythical VAs (evidently there are certification programs for them, I suspect even secret handshakes), I asked the wise authors of The Renegade Writer and the newly released Query Letters that Rock for their take on the matter. Here’s the endlessly informative answer they gave me on their blog, as part of their regular Q&A feature. Thanks again, Linda and Diana. I can hardly wait to get my first virtual cupajoe.
December 5th, 2006
Say hello to Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness, a forthcoming collection of writing edited by my pal Diane Mapes. Seal Press will be publishing this puppy in April.
Doesn’t the cover rock?
I’m honored to have an essay in this book, along with writer pals Amanda Castleman, Litsa Dremousis, Jane Hodges, Judy McGuire, and fab women like Lynn Harris, Margaret Cho, Feministing’s Jessica Valenti, and oh, I could go on and on…
But you can get the full meal deal in April. Or you can check out the entire lineup here, on the blog of lusty contributor Rachel Kramer Bussel.
If you can’t wait till April to make this pretty book your very own, getcher pre-orders here.
December 4th, 2006
I just paid my P.O. box a visit and was thrilled to find BusinessWeek featuring this story on the cover:
Smashing the clock: No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy’s radical reshaping of the workplace
I haven’t read the article yet, but I’m tickled just seeing a major business media outlet taking flex work and the meeting timesuck this seriously. Plus, check out these sidebars:
Rock on, Best Buy! And you go, BusinessWeek. I’m off to devour all three pieces. If I hate the articles, you’ll be the first to know tomorrow. Would love to hear what some of you think, too (nudge, nudge).
December 3rd, 2006
The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap report came out this week. Since I’m in lazy Saturday morning mode, I will quote the Seattle Stranger on how my fair country fared:
The good news: Women in the U.S. live longer, are more likely to be literate, and go to school longer, on average, than women in any other nation.
The bad news: The US ranks 37th in wage equality, 20th in labor force participation, and 66th in political empowerment, determined by combining the number of women in ministerial positions (14 percent), the number of women in Congress (15 percent) and the number of years the nation has had a female head of state (none).
Speaking of women holding roughly 2 percent of all top CEO positions in the US, here’s an interesting report from the Harvard Business Review on how “attitudes about women in executive roles have improved over the past 40 years, but not as much as many men seem to think.” Some snippets from the press release follow, quotes courtesy of Dr. K. Michele Kacmar, one of the authors of the study and a professor of management and the Durr-Fillauer Chair of Business Ethics at the Culverhouse College of Commerce at The University of Alabama:
“For the most part, men don’t see their attitudes toward female executives as being a big problem,” Dr. Kacmar said, “and that in itself may be a problem. When men see the business world as being more rosy for women than women do, that perception may not be accurate.”
Also:
“When every single board member has a daughter or a wife or a sister who can educate them on what it is like to be a female executive, then we will see real change in this area,” she said.
I’m just saying…
December 2nd, 2006
Most of my freelance friends focus on writing articles, blog posts, and books. I have far fewer freelance allies juggling creative pursuits with corporate bread-and-butter work, like I do. So it was refreshing to see the roster for the online course I’m teaching this month through the Editorial Freelancers Association. Many of the students are commercial writers and editors, too.
When I first ventured out into the workforce back in the Ice Age, I didn’t aspire to finesse marketing copy about computer software for a living. But I did aspire to be self-sufficient and leave room in my schedule to write feature stories, essays, and whatever other lower-paying prose my idealistic little heart desired. And my bread-and-butter commercial writing/editing work allows me to do both without much financial worry. Fact of the matter is, it’s infinitely harder to write a halfway decent humor essay when all you can think about is how you’re going to pay the rent tomorrow.
If you’re curious about the world of commercial writing (the bread-and-butter work that allows you to order steak once in a while, or donate a T-bone to a less-fortunate writer), check out the Well-Fed Writer, a website and book of the same name by author Peter Bowerman. The site is loaded with articles, e-books, and other nifty resources. You can also read an interview with Bowerman here, on The Renegade Writer blog. Maybe then you, too, will never again use the words “starving” and “writer” side by side in a sentence.
November 30th, 2006
One of the drawbacks of working at home as freelancer is that when all the local roads have transmogrified into deadly sheets of ice in your normally temperate, snow-plow-free city, you can’t claim that you’re “snowed in” and skip work like all your staffer friends and colleagues.
Such was the case Tuesday, after a few inches of snow reduced Monday evening’s rush hour commute to a turtle crawl. (Friends reported three- to six-hour drives home, instead of the usual one-hour slog.) So on Tuesday, while many of my friends “worked from home” (i.e., checked their work email periodically while playing poker online and marveling at John McBain’s really fake burn scars on OLTL), I found myself fresh out of excuses. Since I hadn’t lost power or broken my hip on the ice while walking the dog, I would still have to meet my deadlines. Unfortunately, my office was open for business.
Some staffer friends, several of whom work for a big client of mine, had yesterday and today off. Today during lunch I called one such friend and asked if he was leaving work early to beat the fresh batch of snow we’re expecting (and the awful gridlock that would invariably ensue). But he was already home, mainly because he hadn’t gone in to work at all, and was well into his third hour of a 13-hour Lord of the Rings-athon.
Suffice it to say, I was feeling less smug by the minute about the October 17th Wall Street Journal headline I’d saved for posterity, “Commuters Heading to Work Earlier,” an article which I never got to read because I’m too cheap to subscribe to the WSJ. But I did manage to see the opening paragraph from some free business e-newsletter I get. It went like this:
With morning traffic worsening nationwide, more commuters are choosing to head to work in the predawn hours, extending the traditional 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. rush hour. More commuters now leave their homes before or after the peak hours, according to a recent report, while public transportation systems and businesses across the country are changing their hours to accommodate the trend.
Blech (except for the flextime part). Only this week, the score is looking more like this: Employees, 1. Freelancers, 0.
[Correction, made on December 2: My LOTR-viewing friend informs me that he did not take off work this week. He was simply working at home, or WAH as they call it in megacorp-land. As I've been trying to tell my family for years, there is a difference. Only I watch GH while working, not LOTR.]
November 29th, 2006
Jessica Simpson’s been slated to star in another abomination of the silver screen, one that’s being hailed as a modern-day “Working Girl.” Just what we need, another dopey pin-up girl tainting the image of hard-working women everywhere. Though, to its credit, 1988’s “Working Girl” does serve as a vehicle for Melanie Griffith to utter this kickass line, which I put at the front of my book:
I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up.
November 29th, 2006
To milk last week’s holiday with ignoble origins a tad longer, following are a few recent news items that made me stand on my desk and cheer (that is, on top of the cancellation of the O.J. media blitz):
The Wall Street Journal released its “50 Women to Watch” list for 2006. Interesting Broadsheet notes here on philanthropist extraordinaire Melinda Gates making the top slot.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a kickass series this month called “The Glass Ceiling: Where a Rise to the Top Stops.” I especially liked the piece on the “Women at the Top” class offered in the University of Washington’s MBA program, which tackles such corporate-ladder issues as dealing with authority (is that a newspaper euphemism for dealing with harassment in the workplace?), balancing family with career, and facing the consequences of leaving the workforce temporarily to raise kids. (Why do we need yet another newspaper series like this? Because as Elana Centor points out on Blogher, the recent appointment of Kerrii Anderson to permanent CEO of Wendy’s brings the total number of women running Fortune 1000 companies to a whopping 2.1 percent. Uh, yay?)
And finally, USA Today has been running a six-week “Young and in Debt” series, which I’m sure most of us can relate to. Check out the live chat today — Monday, November 27 — at noon EST. (Thanks to Boston Gal’s Open Wallet for alerting me to this series.)
November 27th, 2006
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