Great places to find freelance writing jobs

Freelance Writing at About.com's list of lists is finished! She's been posting lists of places to find freelance writing jobs and the list is now complete.

Here are the links:

LIST ONE


LIST TWO


LIST THREE


LIST FOUR


LIST FIVE


Hopefully this list of lists will yield some results for you work-at-home writer moms out there. I have applied for several jobs I've found on these lists and have gotten a few of them. One of them I plan to accept.

Happy writing!

More places to find freelance writing jobs

Freelance Writing at About.com has released the fourth and fifth installments of its series of five lists of places to find freelance writing jobs! (Whew, if that wasn't a run-on sentence I don't know what is. My apologies to my dear 10th grade English teacher!)


List # 4

List # 5


I've been doing some online hunting the past few weeks and really appreciate these great lists. I've posted previously about the other three lists. If you missed it these links will take you to the first three lists.

Microsoft Office aggravation

I posted yesterday about getting Microsoft Office Live but have experienced problems with the regular Office program on my laptop today. I thought that new Wordpad documents would work even after the time limit on the program that came with the computer was over, but it turns out that new Wordpad documents convert to Word after they are saved and closed. That doesn't help me any because right now I can't even copy text from a Word document to save it in something else.

So as things are right now I'll have to email myself my Word documents, open them on my desktop, copy the text and email them back to myself if I need them on my laptop.

That's the free solution, anyway. I can also get a 60-day trial of it. I think I'll end up having to buy the cheapest version of it for my laptop.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office has a new (or at least it's new to me) feature ... it's available online for free!

Microsoft Office Live

I signed up for it today and hope it will help with all the going back and forth between two computers I've been doing lately.

I have a nice version of Microsoft Office (the version with Publisher on it since I use that to create my newsletters) on my desktop computer. Since I got a laptop and then got it hooked up to wireless Internet I've been using the laptop for most of my Internet needs the past few weeks. It's much faster plus the screen looks much better. The monitor on my desktop is shot and the Internet and hard drive is pretty slow since I've got so much stuff on it. But the desktop must remain my main working computer because of Office being on there, plus it's hooked up to a printer.

You upload documents to share on your Office Workspace, so I've put a few things on my workspace, specifically my resume and writing samples documents. I'm not sure if you can edit documents in your own workspace but I imagine I'll find out.

After I've had a chance to better check it out I'll report back on how it really works.

Another list of places to find jobs

Freelance writing at About.com has published its third (of five) list of places to find great freelance writing jobs.

I've previously posted about the first two lists; links to them are also included in this third list.

I took a look at the first link (to a Yahoo group) and an ad for a copy editor for the state paper here was right at the top. So I think that group would be well worth the time it would take to look it over.

While you are checking out the lists of places to find jobs, be sure to subscribe to the freelance writing newsletter. It's full of this kind of helpful information.

I'm wireless!

We finally got my laptop hooked up to the Internet with a wireless connection!

We got the laptop back this spring and my husband has been wanting to get it hooked up to wireless ever since then. He bought me a wireless router and hooked it up, but it wouldn't work properly. It kicked me off the Internet entirely even. I had to call the phone/Internet company and they said we needed to get an Ethernet card. We needed that to hook up to the Internet from our PC instead of the USB port we had been using. (Our PC is an old computer. We bought it in 2000 and have gotten many more years of use out of it than we expected.)

In the meantime I still had a dialup connection so I hooked my laptop up to that sometimes in the phone line upstairs. (The dialup is gone now but I don't need it anymore anyway!)

We got the Ethernet card last Friday night and my husband spent a good portion of the day Sunday getting the wireless connection going. He had some rough spots during the process but he kept at it and was finally successful that evening. I was so impressed and so thankful and still am.

I absolutely LOVE it. Wireless is awesome. My laptop is awesome. I am able to use it and get on the Internet anywhere in the house.

I will have to continue to use the PC as my main work computer because that is the computer that has Microsoft Office. Right now I have the laptop right beside the PC and I'm using the desktop for working/writing stories and the laptop for accessing the Internet, and I'm alternating between the two. Yes, I get distracted easily!

Get organized with checklists!

Printable Checklists has tons of checklists to help us busy working moms get organized! I'm amazed at the number of free checklists available on the site. There is everything from charts to record your child's tooth loss to grocery lists by food type to family expense charts.

When you browse through the site you will most likely find checklists for things you haven't even thought about! It's all free, so what's not to love about that!

www.printablechecklists.com

My favorite Work At Home Mother site, www.mommyjobs.com, has a nice list of checklists as well.

I found the Printable Checklists site through one of our freebie fiends at Mommy Jobs, in fact. Hop on over to our busy message board and check out all the other great free finds and join in our discussions about working from home, parenting, saving money, you name it!

Getting a budget set up

I'm trying to get some good budgeting practices set up, especially since I'm not working as much as I once was and the money is tighter. This article has some good tips for managing the family's finances:

Simple Household Budgeting Tips

By: Stefani Partin

Are you the head of the household of your family and need some tips on making your life a little simpler? Those that work, take care of the kids and pay the bills have a hard time keeping everything organized. Below are some tips to help budget your household and some maybe even have some fun doing it.

Keep your financial records current. Keep a filing system and create folders for items such as receipts, tax returns, billing statements, bank statements, credit reports, etc. Keep everything in one designated place so it is easy to find when you need it. For your mail, have one designated place to put it daily when you receive it. Most all of us have misplaced our mail at one time in our life. Misplaced mail could mean late payments, which means late charges. Set a specific time of the day or week to handle all of your bookkeeping and stick to it. When I speak of bookkeeping, I speak of paying bills, filing bills, going through your mail, etc.

If you have online banking with your bank, set it up. I cannot tell you how easy it is to pay my bills with my online banking. The day I receive a bill in the mail, I will log into my bank account and schedule the payment. The bank then sends the payment by mail or electronically and has it paid on the date that I scheduled it to be paid. This service is even free with my bank. It saves time writing out checks and I also save on the postage.

Get your kids involved in your budgeting. Pay your children an allowance. Have them use the allowance for things they want to buy like candy, movies, toys, games, etc instead of just giving them money when they need it. Having your children pay for their own stuff with their own money will teach them at an early age how to spend wisely.

You can save hundreds of dollars per year shopping at the lower-priced food stores. You might even save thousands depending on how much your family spends and where you shop. Convenience stores will most often charge high prices then compared to a grocery store. Don't go to the store when you are hungry either, this will cause you to buy more goodies then you would normally buy. Be wise and compare price-per-ounce or other unit prices on shelf labels.

When setting your family budget, don't make your budget so tight that it's impossible to keep. Set goals, short term and long term and try your best to achieve them.

Article Source: http://www.mommy-articles.com

© 2006 Stefani Partin, a work at home mom of three from CA who owns a network of sites for moms, blogs, a newsletter and more. Stefani dedicates her time to helping moms find ways to make money at home. Visit Stefani's blog at www.StefaniPartin.com or visit her main site at www.MommyEnterprises.com.

Freelance writing newsletter

The freelance writing newsletter at About.com is amazing. It contains more than enough information about everything under the sun that is related to writing.

Here's the link to the signup page for the freelance writing newsletter:

http://freelancewrite.about.com/gi/pages/mmail.htm

You can also sign up for their other newsletters but you won't want to miss the freelance writing one.

Sources for freelance writing jobs

I just ran into this blog called "Writer's Resources."

http://www.writersresources.blogspot.com

It has listings of current job postings, so it looks like it would be worth checking out.

A blog that has been around for a while and is very well-known for its daily listings of current jobs is www.freelancewritinggigs.com.

I have been checking it out for the past few days and there is a great variety of job listings every day.

Also, Freelance Writing has a weekly newsletter called "Morning Coffee" that is full of current job listings. You can read it online at www.freelancewriting.com or subscribe to the Yahoo group to have it emailed to you.

For more writing jobs, you can go to www.craigslist.org and click on your city or state, and then go down to "writing jobs." I applied to a couple of jobs that I found there and got a response back from one right away. It was from a fellow freelance writer needing help from time to time. I didn't accept the position but was glad to know that there are legitimate writing jobs posted there. Some of the jobs posted at the previously mentioned sites are actually from Craigslist, so you can find those listings at the freelance writing job blogs I mentioned or just go directly to the site and search for positions in your area.

I've been perusing through online job postings for the past few days, but haven't devoted much time and effort to it. I have been much more successful in finding work in the local print market, which is another avenue freelance writers don't want to overlook!

Happy writing!

Freelance writing job listings!

Leave it to me to find the second part of a two-part list first and not even realize it's the second part of a two-part list!

The link in my last post that leads to an About.com list of 10 places to find freelance jobs is that very second part of a two-part list.

Here's the link to the first half of that list.

This list looks to be a good one for finding leads as well. I think I'll check into figuring out the local Craigslist.

Looking for ideas

Though I'm not sure how I'll fit much work in around a bunch of kids this summer, I'm looking for story ideas/work.

In my search this evening, I ran across some interesting places to find jobs.

I opened my freelance writing newsletter from about.com and it has a link to a great list of places to find freelance writing jobs. It looks like a really good list.

Here's the link to the list.


While not helpful with local story ideas this list looks like it would be worth taking some time to check. Since I began freelancing more than four years ago I haven't found one job online but there's always a first time. I actually did put a lot of time into looking online when I first started out but I had no success. All of my jobs came from local publications and have continued to do so. Since I'm looking for more ideas/work I'll take some time with this list, too.

One of the sources in the list, the weekly newsletter "Morning Coffee" from Freelance Writing contains dozens of pretty good job leads. I signed up for the Yahoo group freelancewritingjobs to receive email notification every Tuesday about the new edition, but it looks like the newsletter can be accessed directly on the website.

There are some other really good sources on the list as well.

Down two jobs

In the past couple of weeks I've relinquished two jobs. One I informed that I wouldn't be writing for them anymore; another let me know today that for financial reasons I wouldn't be needed anymore.

It was very hard to let the first go; the second came just a few hours after I thought about quitting that one too.

Both jobs are an hour and a half away, and that was a big part of the reason I needed to give them up.

The first job was with a newspaper; it was my first freelance position and I had been writing for them for four years. I wrote a human interest piece every single week for them for the first two years. We moved then to a city an hour and a half away (before I only lived 25 minutes away) but I figured I could make it work. I thought that I would see how things went and if it got too difficult because of the distance I would quit.

It was difficult at first because of the distance and the time needed to adjust to move, and I struggled that first summer after we moved. Finally I got things ironed out and was once again able to keep up with the weekly assignments. Another big kink in my work schedule came in April of last year, when my son was born. I found it terribly difficult to produce a weekly piece, and asked to write every other week. This, too, proved to be too much for me and a few months ago I met with the editor and was reluctantly given permission to write a monthly feature.

Right around the first of this year it finally dawned on me (like someone slapped me and brought me to my senses all of a sudden) that this arrangement was simply not working for me anymore. I had told myself before the move that if it wasn't making sense anymore that I would stop writing for them. It was long past not making any sense anymore. I had pieces lined up for January and February, so after completing the story for February, I let the editor know that I needed to stop writing for them because the distance had become too much of a problem.

The second job I had only been doing a little better than a year. I produced a quarterly newsletter for a nonprofit organization. Interestingly enough, I became acquainted with this organization because of writing a story about them for the newspaper I just mentioned. At that time we briefly discussed the possibility of me taking on their newsletter but neither they nor I pursued it. Then one day out of the blue, after we had moved, I got a call from the director asking if I was still interested. I responded that I was, and we met and got all the details worked out.

For the past few months it has not been easy to contact them or communicate with them; this is probably due in part to some changes in staff, a change in location, and some issues with the Internet. I was just thinking last night that this might be a good time to part ways, and then this morning I got an email from them. I was sort of relieved because it kept me from having to undergo another months-long internal struggle.

That leaves me with three jobs — two other newspaper jobs and another newsletter assignment. One of the newspaper jobs is monthly; the other is whenever I decide to write and the newsletter job is quarterly. Having fewer jobs will mean, I hope, more time to write for the newspaper that allows me to write as much or as little as I like.

Helping mom work

My children frequently accompany me on work trips, but one we took in February was special because I was asked to take some photos of them to accompany my story.

We were touring the White House in Miniature display at the William Jefferson Clinton Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. I photographed them looking at the display and wrote a story about a child's viewpoint of the display.

Here is a scan of the story and photograph. You can get a better look at it by going to the STAND News website and choosing the option of reading the March issue.

The girls were in the paper once before; that was a fluke. We were touring the Ozark Folk Center near Mountain View, Arkansas. We were there doing a story on another person, but I photographed them with a lady who makes old-fashioned dolls. I ended up writing a story about this lady for the Three Rivers Edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and they used pictures of the girls watching her make their dolls to go with it.

That was easy!

In just an hour or so yesterday evening I accomplished what it took me parts of two days last year and an entire day the year before to do so we could file for our income taxes.

My old method involved sorting through piles of paid bill stubs and expense receipts for those figures and thumbing through my planner to calculate my mileage for the year. Last year was especially difficult since I was pregnant and we had moved the year before, so I had sets of bills for two houses and they weren't filed very well.

After sitting up on the couch surrounded by stacks of papers for two days last year — seven months pregnant — and using an old laptop computer as a calculator, I decided I had to upgrade my system.

I had just gotten Excel but couldn't quickly figure out how to set up an income/expenditure sheet. I just opened a Word document and created headings for each utility bill, mileage, and expenses, with each month of the year as a subheading for each. As I paid the bills last year or purchased something, I entered the figures on my worksheet. I wasn't as diligent at recording each month's figures in the months after the baby was born, but finding just a few amounts was a whole lot easier than a whole year's worth.

When it came time to have the figures for income tax filing purposes, all I had to do was add up the numbers. If I could learn how to use Excel even that part would be done for me. But at least this year it was much easier to come up with the figures I needed. My goal for recording this year's tax information is to learn how to use Excel so it will take just a few minutes at tax time to come up with the numbers.

Goal for the new year

My work goal this year is very simply to get some work done. It's not ambitious by any means, but then again with an infant around just getting some work done is rather ambitious itself.

(The last time I posted was just a few hours before he was born, and that was nine months ago. My work has been nearly as sparse as my posts.)

My work, and hence my income and my opportunities for more work, suffered greatly last year since I was not able to write as much as I was before the baby was born. Fortunately, I didn't lose any jobs/clients, but I did have to go from a weekly assignment to a monthly assignment with one newspaper and went for months on end without submitting anything to my best paying newspaper client.

Desperation has brought on several light bulb moments lately and one of them was to try working at night and at other times when I have some help with the baby.

Though I hate working while my husband and the other kids are around (I feel that I should be spending that time with them) I've been having them babysit the baby while I work some in the afternoons/evenings. The baby is old enough now to go to bed with his dad at night and sleep three or four hours for the first stretch, and I've been using that time to really get down to business.

I've continued to make my phone calls during the day, and then I use the evenings/night to actually write. This plan seems so simple but my mind was clouded with many things, including a great deal of frustration in not being able to get anything accomplished.

It's all worked out unbelievably well so far. The weekends seem to be my best times to work, since I have more hours available with someone to help care for the baby. I work a few hours a few nights during the week depending on how much work I have to do.

I just started this a few weeks ago but it's going really well. I got caught up very quickly and have now am working to get back to normal with everything on frequency of publication.

A side goal for this would to become more balanced with working, getting enough rest, and spending more time with my family. Now that goal is ambitious.

Tax day!

It's tax day today!

We were expecting a refund so we filed a few weeks ago, although it wasn't nearly as early as we would have like to have filed. We were waiting on me to tally up all my self-employment income and expenditures, which in the wake of a move topped with bad record-keeping practices, was not an easy venture.

I did learn something from it though ... I MUST keep better records. I have Excel now and could make up worksheets for all my expenditures but haven't bothered to learn how to properly use it.

In the meantime I'm keeping tabs with everything in a Word document. I have several headings broken up by month and every time I spend money for my business ventures I enter the figure in my document. I have individual columns for each of our utilties (electricity, water, gas, and phone/Internet) since a portion of those can be counted as business expenses. I have a column for mileage and another for expenses like computer programs, supplies, or whatever it is that I bought.

I do pretty good with keeping up with all my income. I get 1099s for most of my work but I keep all the payment stubs since invariably there will be a job (or two or three) for which I won't get a 1099. For that reason I don't have the payments on my new tax document.

Hopefully next year it won't be as difficult or time-consuming to tabulate everything in preparation for a visit to the tax office!

It's tax time again!

It's that time again ... TAX TIME!

As a work-at-home writer mom I'm of course self-employed and responsible for keeping up with all sorts of things we need for filing income taxes, from mileage to expenses. A more organized working mom than I would have a better system in place to keep up with everything as the year goes on. Suffice it to say that I've been dreading pulling out and tallying up all this information even though I'm looking forward to getting a refund this year, as usual.

So far I've made my list of what I need to do:

• Count up mileage
• Tally expenses
• Figure up utilities
• Go through Paypal records for both income and expenditures
• Collect additional income figures, those for which I have no 1099s

I've broken down my 1099 list into companies I've either received the forms from or from whom I need forms. I'm just missing one. I've also broken down the sources of additional income into categories and subcategories.

While pulling out utility bills, receipts, and so forth I've decided that my system needs an overhaul and that this house needs a good cleaning. But that will have to wait until I get all these figures tallied up and I can deliver the good news that my part of the income tax preparation has been completed!

The Microsoft Office Suite

I just got the Microsoft Office Suite!

I needed Microsoft Office Publisher to create my two newsletters and for other work-related tasks and decided I may as well get the whole thing, the small business package that includes Publisher.

I went online to download the free trial version at www.office.microsoft.com and I now have the whole thing for free until the end of March. I will be purchasing the program then.

Something unexpected happened when I downloaded the program -- all my Wordpad documents were automatically converted to Word documents. While that was a tad disconcerting at first, it turns out that Word is way better since it counts your words for you. I very rarely have to count my words but that feature came in handy tonight since I was writing a story that was supposed to be 300 words. (I held it to 400.) It does lots of other neat things that I haven't explored.

The Publisher program works great as well, and I'll be using that instead of Adobe Pagemaker to create the newsletters for two nonprofit organizations.

It feels good to be caught up with the rest of the world!

The printing saga continues

An update to Friday's drama with getting a couple of newsletters printed is ... BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

The printing place called me this morning and said one of the documents I tried to send in on Friday afternoon was password coded.

"Never mind on that," I said, "I messed that up. Did you get TWO print jobs in?" No, they didn't. The larger job didn't go through over the email. It was too large.

I was asked to go through the website to place my order. I tried that but it said the file was too large. The site told me to try a custom order, which requires you to plug in the store location, but when I did that the site said that location wasn't found. (It's there, I've been there AND I was looking at the address on the directions I printed from that very website.)

Okay, so I call the store back and am asked to BRING THE DISK IN TO THE STORE, which of course is what I originally tried to do a few days ago!

The man was very nice and apologetic about all the trouble. They were also nice and apologetic when I did indeed bring my disk back to the store.

Of course I had the number of pages figured up wrong. I submitted 10 pages which won't work with a two-page spread, since one sheet of 11x17 paper folded in half makes four 8½x11 pages. In all my years of working with two-page spread publications, I should know that your pages must be in multiples of four. So I either need to send in two more pages or figure out where the blank pages are going to be. I opt for sending in two more pages and hurry home to come up with something and send it in.

The incorrect number of pages was also a problem with the other newsletter, but it was printed without me being notified of the problem or approving a sample. I sent in six pages (it should have been either four or 10, if I had looked at a sample before it went to press I would have pulled two pages and saved them for the next newsletter) so they put blank pages for the last two pages. That's going to present a problem because some of the newsletters will be folded in half for mailing with the back cover being the part that shows.

Now I have to make yet ANOTHER trip to the printing place tomorrow to approve the sample on the second, larger newsletter.

I'm getting really tired of the printing office, and so are my kids!