Do you have a Monday checklist? I do. I use it to prepare myself for the week and make sure i have everything necessary to get started. I add all deadlines and details to my Outlook, make sure I’m stocked up on supplies, charge my electronics and do whatever I can to ensure a positive start to my week. What’s your Monday ritual?
Not a huge list today, since I posted leads yesterday. (Hat Tip: Funds for Writers – Some of today’s markets came from Hope’s wonderful list. Remember, markets aren’t places that are necessarily hiring. They’re magazines and websites looking for you to pitch an article.)
Leads…
- Cosmos Writers Guidelines $100+/article
- HuntingNet.com Guidelines – Up to $350/article
- Northwest Fly Fishing Guidelines – $50 – $600/article
- Green Futures Guidelines – Up to 800GBP/article
- Today’s Caregiver Guidelines
- Active Over 50 Guidelines
- New Zealand Writer for Newsletters
- Freelance Web Content Writers - Atlanta
- Real Estate Bloggers - Boston – $250
- Musician Bio Writer
- Editor Needed with Art History Background – $300
- Copy Editor – Denver
- Article Writing
- Freelance Review Writers - $25/review
- Writers with Good Research Skills Needed
- Green Article Writing
- Skateboarding Journalists/Photographers
- Creative Writing - Spanish Advertising
- Grant Writer
- Celebrity Website Looking for Writers
- Business Plan Writer
Have a great day, folks!
Awesome List!!! I have been collecting guidelines over the years for different magazines. All of these are missing from my collection.
Thanks Deb! You certainly come up with surprises.
Thanks for the posts! I submitted what I thought to be an insightful and unique article query to Cosmos but they deleted my email without reading? Then I wrote back asking if there was something wrong, only to see it was deleted again without reading?
Has anyone else experienced this? Why would this occur? just a little concerned and hurt:(
I write a to do list and add to it as the week progresses. It’s very theraputic and rewarding to get DONES!!!
I don’t have a Monday checklist. What I do have is a set of milestones I plan out for myself, and I try very hard to meet those deadlines, even though they are only personal. Since I only freelance part-time, I don’t really have an overly-stressful workload, so I can generally work at a relaxing pace.
Even when I was in construction I never really looked at things from a Monday to Friday basis. If I told a client that I would have the job done in X amount of days, I always held to it. Sometimes that meant I worked 14-16 hour days on Saturday and Sunday if I made the commitment, and I’ve even worked a couple of holidays (the most recent was Thanksgiving of 2007 because I told the client I’d have his job done by Friday and ran into some complications that required me to put in some extra time on Thanksgiving Day).
These days I give myself extra time, though. I remember one job in particular when I was still doing custom homes when I came across a contractor who needed a quick remodel of a bathroom. I hate remodels and generally tried to avoid doing them at all costs, so I quoted him a ridiculous fee that was far beyond my normal rates…3 thousand dollars for a 3-day project that was really only worth about 2k. He agreed to pay it, so I said what the heck. Imagine my surprise when I went in to gut the place and found out the counter-top had been installed using epoxy thinset/grout, and the simple gut-and-replace job became a three day nightmare. My wife actually came in and helped me, and if you’ve seen my blog and checked out hers via the links, she’s a tiny thing, barely weighing 105 lbs and 5 feet 2 inches. We ended up pulling 2 15 hour days and one 12 hour day to get the job done before the homeowners returned from their vacation, and I will forever be in utter amazement at the strength, dedication, and loyalty of my teeny tiny wife for swinging a hammer doing demolition work for 2 days in a row. Not a single complaint, even when she got blisters!
Down with Mondays!
I’d much rather have every day of the week be called “Today” and simply look at what you have on your plate for that day!
Ok, is the heart-in-the-cream done on purpose or was that just pure luck that it turned out that way in the coffee picture?
I just realized the picture lol
On a side note…it looks like I have a success story to post. I think the lead came from about a week or so back, but it looks like I am getting put on board to write in the Food and Drinks section over at http://www.greendivamom.com. I’ve been talking to their editor in chief for the past couple of days and it looks like I’ll be regularly contributing starting next week.
Was perfect timing, actually. My wife and I had been talking about doing a “green” cook book over the course of this summer purely for fun and seeing if we couldn’t sell it as an e-book (we still have plans to do it) and when I saw that job lead posted I went “hmmmm”, because I’ve been in that frame of mind for the past year or so. I’m the main cook around here and I generally try 2-3 new recipes per week, adjusting them to fit our own personal style. Also, living in a non-Western country means I’ve had to learn how to cook a lot of “raw” foods. You can’t get flour tortillas here, for example, or refried beans, or salsa…hell, you can’t get anything “mexican” here, so I have had to learn how to make a lot of things from scratch, and they are *far* healthier when made at home than the canned varieties sold to consumers in the States, packed full of preservatives and that God-awful product called corn syrup. I’ve learned how to make chili powder from scratch, my own variety of hummus, and so on and so forth.
Anyway, that’s my random blurb for the day. Time to go get some chapter work done! Hope everyone has a perfect week.
@T.W. – The heart is actually there. I saw a show on it once, most coffee baristas learn how to do this heart when preparing a cappuccino. This picture may have been photoshopped though because usually the heart has a darker outline.
The job for Freelance Review Writers. I had my suspicions that this was another of those review job scams that have been discussed before. Sure enough, I got a standard response telling me I had to go sign up using the link enclosed that provides the person with referral fees for getting people to sign up.
I never really paid attention to the frills of coffee baristas. That’s pretty neat, though
Another bonus…looks like I just got accepted to write for Demand Studios as well, after about a week of waiting for my resume to go through. After my initial browsing I already found nearly two dozen articles I can easily cover, so that was a rewarding afternoon picker-upper.
I get no where with Demand Studios. I finally got them to accept my W-9. But when I log in for the past two weeks, the same message telling me that they currently have no jobs available comes up. I know that’s not true because the screen at the bottom shows there are thousands of jobs available. So their system really dislikes me for whatever reason.
@Anne–did you fill out your profile information? I think some new writers have that problem when they haven’t filled out all necessary information. If not, contact them, they’re usually quite helpful. Currently, there are plenty of titles available.
@Chris – My profile’s filled out. For whatever reason, this account just hasn’t gone smoothly. It took months to get them to recognize they had my W-9, and finally they found a computer glitch with my account after numerous attempts to tell them I’d submitted the info. So now I’m stuck in another waiting pattern of getting them to find out what’s going on now I guess.
@Anne G: I had a similar problem with Demand. I got accepted as a writer about a year ago without a problem, but I experienced problems later. I never wrote on any of their provided topics. Instead, I submitted several ideas and had them all accepted right away. I then wrote the articles and had most of them accepted with no revisions necessary. Those that needed revisions were minor. Then, all of the sudden, I got the same message as you on my account. After waiting a couple weeks to just see if the problem would resolve itself, I sent a message to them about my frozen account and never got response. This happened several months ago and, honestly, I just moved on without giving it much more thought because it wasn’t a major source of income and I had other projects to work on. But, I revisited my account a couple weeks ago after trying to apply for their travel writing position. I found the same message, so I sent a new message to Demand asking why my account appeared to be frozen. They finally did respond this time, telling me my account had been frozen because I hadn’t been following their editorial guidelines and because my proposed topics weren’t the sort of thing they were looking for.
I found this to be very strange since the editors NEVER told me I wasn’t following the guidelines properly and all but one of my proposed topics had been accepted (and the one that wasn’t accepted was, quite honestly, because their editors have no understanding of my area of expertise and they didn’t understand my title proposal – I think my attempts to explain this topic so they could understand it better is probably why my account was frozen).
Anyway, good luck. While Demand was on time with payment and the amount of pay is decent for what you have to do for them, I have found them to be generally unresponsive to questions and I thought the article proposal procedures could have use some improvement. Perhaps that has improved by now.
I have been working with Demand Studios for a little over a week and have had no problems. My articles are reviewed quickly and the payment went through without a hitch.
I have heard several hit and miss responses from people. So I am assuming my time will be coming soon.
CAVEAT! That $20/hr job is in fact $5 per post.
Wendy
Deb:
Thanks for posting leads a little later in the day than before. I know people like to get a jump on leads in the morning, but since I used to visit FWJ in the morning and troll the sites myself at the end of the day, I found that the early leads were leads that I had already seen the night before. Now you are able to include much fresher leads.
@ Caroline: How did you know they deleted your emails w/o reading them? Does your email tell you?
@ Anne: I also signed up with Demand Studios but they always say there are no opportunities for me either.. even when there is a list of assignments they need writers for that I know I could do. I didn’t submit a W-9 form though, as I have pretty much given up on them..