Getting Down to Business!

Some people write for a living. I used to be one of them. Every day, I went to the office and I wrote. First I interviewed and took photos, and then I wrote. Then I attended city council meetings, school board meetings, this and that meetings and took photos, and then I wrote. Dream job? Not exactly. Ask my kids.

Anyway, writing--whether you do it at an office and are paid a wage or sit in front of your own computer at home writing a novel--is a business. The sooner we look at it this way, the better our chances of success.

At Thursday night's creative writing class, Ruth Hill, a writer from Chetwynd, spoke to us about the business and record-keeping aspects of writing. She had many good suggestions and has done lots of research on this topic.

I came home from class excited about the possibilities ahead of me! Ruth had several different information-gathering-and-tracking pages loaded with tons of questions and blank spaces for the answers. I wasn't sure I was that organized!

What I did was create an Excel spreadsheet for upcoming writing contests. The columns across detail things like name of contest, deadline date, entry fee, prizes, when winners will be announced, word or line limit, genre, web site, etc., etc. Ah, now we're cooking with gas, as my father used to say!

I'm working on filling it all in. This is where the research comes in, and I'll probably lean on some of what Ruth has done.

Another tool that I thought some people might think is handy is BirthdayAlarm.com (no, I'm not asking you to remember my birthday!) As an event, you could enter the deadline date of the contests, and then automatically, BirthdayAlarm.com would send you a reminder two weeks ahead and one week ahead! What a system!

Then I'm going to make another spreadsheet to keep track of pieces that I submit to journals or magazines.

Okay, gotta get writing so I'll have something to submit.