Set your rates as a freelancer and make a profit — I’ve written recently about why having a set hourly rate is better than just using a fee schedule, but sometimes setting a fee schedule works much better for your freelance writing business. A fee schedule is your primary pricing reference even if you have a set hourly rate. You have…

Going below your break-even will break your business — An uncomfortable truth of freelance writing is that not every client is going to pay exactly what you want. This is especially true when you’re new to this business. Clients will cite your lack of experience in their offer. …

We’re beating back Covid-19 with vaccines. Why not Lyme disease next? — Living in a Lyme hotspot, the Northeast U.S., makes every trip into the woods a little bit fraught. It’s especially so this year, because the tick population exploded in the spring. …

Pandemic-driven newbies are inundating popular trails and campsites. Here’s how to coexist peacefully. — Last year, photos of Max Patch, a grassy meadow on the Appalachian Trail, set off gasps of shock from experienced hikers. Trash was strewn everywhere. Discarded beer bottles, tents and bedding littered the clearing. When I first glanced at the photo online, I thought the accompanying article would be about…

Why shifting to an hourly rate helps you and your clients — Last year, after a review of my business plan, I made a huge shift. Rather than negotiating different prices for different writing assignments, I set a single hourly rate and stuck to it. And you should it, too. Why? So you won’t starve while learning how to accurately estimate the…

My hard lesson that low-wage work does not mean low skills — When I was 19, a McDonald’s manager paid me to quit. I was awful at my job. With the exception of the fry station, I was roundly horrible at every task I was given. I couldn’t keep up with orders on the grill. My order assembly was a disaster, always…

Pay attention to how you write headlines — What’s in a headline? Almost everything, if you write it correctly. When you write a headline describing your brand-new Medium post, you’re carrying on a tradition that goes all the way back to 18th-century printers hanging their broadsheets out to dry. But what is truly “correct” about a headline in…

March up to the weight rack and get started — I am not a confident athlete. I love playing different sports, but walking up and trying a new exercise or joining a new sport takes a monumental emotional effort on my part. Weight training was something I wanted to get into for years. …

I never worried about internet until I moved to a rural community. Now it’s a constant aggravation. — When I moved out of Boston in March 2020, with the pandemic at my heels, getting enough broadband bandwidth to work reliably from home wasn’t the biggest worry on my mind. It wasn’t even too big of a concern a half-year earlier, when I’d started looking for a house to…