Before becoming a full-time writer and starting my own writing business, I worked as a:

House CleanerBabysitter, housecleaner, science lab lackey, sales girl, makeup model, dog walker, gift wrapper, youth orchestra assistant, modern dancer,
yard woman, publicist, arts administrator, community organizer, massage therapist, full-time mother, ghost writer.

My husband, Bill Henderson, always tells aspiring writers to tend bar or work construction: “Do something completely unrelated to words.”

He didn’t, however, follow his own advice, working as a corporate communications writer and a creative writing professor.

Jane Friedman (excellent blog for writers) recommends this 2-minute video (from another good blog) about what some writers have done to pay the bills.

How about you and your job-list?

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I often walk through a park when I’m in Boston. As the sun was rising, I took off and found this portrait–along with a stray baseball cap, a notice about lost sunglasses, and other local info–tacked to the park’s bulletin board.

Not sure if you can read the words. The bullets note how long the dog was a member of the park community and squirrel patrol. Moxie’s political views favored off-leash legislation. Moxie was named for the drink, not for courage.

In just a few bullets we get to know Moxie and the humans with whom the dog shared a long, joyful life. Last bullet: Best Friend

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Mother’s Bad Advice

August 6, 2011

When I was in high school, my mother told me: “Don’t take typing. That way you won’t end up being a secretary.” This is probably the worst advice ever. I had to pay friends to type my long papers in college. Remember: back then white out ruled and carbon paper. Cut and paste? Didn’t exist. […]

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The Book in Hand and a Reading Tonight

July 21, 2011

The journey started a few years back when I offered a reflective writing workshop for a group of burned out women ministers and Christian educators–they gathered each month for a restorative morning together. We met again, and again, and began to envision a book of their writings. And now, voila! The first group reading from […]

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I’d Rather Be Teaching

July 15, 2011

“Devote myself to my students, my teaching,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in her raw and oh-so-real memoir, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. “This is something that I can do, that is of value.” She writes these words in the desperate weeks after her husband’s death, when she can barely leave her bed but can’t stand […]

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Cats Get a Bad Rap

June 16, 2011

“Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopath of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and […]

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Forget what you learned in high school English

May 18, 2011

Like everybody else, I had plenty of topic-sentence obsessed English teachers and I’ve had plenty of students who have trouble breaking out of dreary opening beats. Listen here to “This American Life” genius Ira Glass show how to drop that bad beginning and get to the guts of good story telling. I found this on […]

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Gotta Love Doing It .. . Writing that is

May 7, 2011

In Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True, Elizabeth Berg says, “What you have to be is in love. With writing. Not with ideas about what to write; not with daydreams about what you’re going to do when you’re successful. You have to be in love with writing itself, with the solitary and […]

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Brand-Building? Just Do It.

May 1, 2011

In Sunday’s Times Book Review, Tony Perrottot discusses all the ways authors have promoted themselves, for millennia: In 440 B. C. author Herodotus funded his own Aegean book tour. In 1887, Guy de Maupassant launched a hot-air balloon with his latest short story title emblazoned on the side. Hemingway made Ballantine Ale ads in 1951. […]

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Whatever Helps . . . To Get the Writing Done

April 26, 2011

Beverly Cleary, 95, author of the Ramona books and many others, writes: “When I am writing a book I also enjoy ironing, an idiosyncrasy that probably makes me sound more domestic than I really am. Working with my hands frees my imagination.” After three delete all sessions and staring at the blinking cursor, I got […]

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