When you are working as a freelance writer, one of the things you need is a good mail room. Now, this does not have to be an actual room dedicated to mail, but it should be an area in your home office that is dedicated to the needs of mailing manuscripts and magazine subscription renewals and paying bills that relate to the business you are running. I prefer to keep such things separated from my day to day expenses as much as possible, so my office has a small mail room built into it just inside the door where I can store mail supplies.

A shelf holds a mail sorter with room for letters and large envelopes and even magazines to be tucked when the mail arrives. Next to that, on the same shelf, is an area where I can store return address labels, business cards, envelope seals, stamps and other small necessities. I have an area where envelopes are stored until needed with sections for standard envelopes, post cards, and two different sizes of white manila envelopes (9×11.5 and 10×12) These are to mail a manuscript with a SASE that will hold the returned manuscript. I also have an area that will eventually hold ink pads and stamps as well as other small items such as paper clips and rubber bands.

The trick is to determine what you will be needing for your office mail room and incorporating those into the mail room. There is a little known trick for eBay where you can get boxes for mailing when you have sold I think 4 items in a specific time, but did you know that you can get mailing supplies at any time from the USPS website? Do you do a lot of shipping using Priority Mail and can never find the size of box or envelope you need at your local post office? You can get the Priority Mail supplies you need mailed directly to you for free by visiting the Priority Mail supplies page at the USPS website.  This includes boxes and envelopes and even Priority Mail stickers and mailing receipts.

(continued from part 1)

What kind of writer are you?

Look at your desk and consider for a moment how much of it is dedicated to writing as opposed to say… entertainment? Do you have a stereo on the desk? I don’t, but maybe you do, and maybe it is there for a good reason, maybe you can’t get any work done unless you are listening to mood music? Do you have a selection of CDs that you keep handy so you can put on the right type of music for each of your scenes that you are working on? Sort of like the soundtrack in a movie. This would probably mean that you are into sensory stimulation when you are writing and if you hit writer’s block then maybe all you need is some alone time with a pen and paper and the right kind of music to get the muses back in line?

Look back at your desk and the shelves in your office. What else is there? There… on that shelf, what are those? Are they… ummm.. dare I call them toys? I know I have toys in my office. Well, I don’t really think of them as toys, they are props. Watch any movie, you see props to help make the movie seem more real. I have a Lego dragon with his warrior rider sitting up on a shelf behind me. Why? No, I don’t take him down and play with him (no, really, I don’t) I have him as a design for what a harness and saddle on a dragon might look like. How might someone ride a dragon? Would that nose ring with chains leading back to the rider really be a practical way to steer a dragon? I have other toy- errr props in here too. A pair of modified Barbie dolls that I made up as fairies gives me an idea for what my idea of a fairy would look like. A marionette of a horse hung by my book case is currently playing a role in a short story I am working on that has a toy maker in a medieval village creating marionettes - I don’t know if this story will go anywhere or not, but it is something I have hopes for.

Okay, so now we know if you are a visual writer. Other clues that you are a visual writer would be if, like me, you have a map of your world. Now, maybe it’s not painted on the wall like mine, you might have it rolled up in a drawer or tucked in a notebook, but maps are very visual items and the more you have the more likely you are to be a visual writer. Pictures of your characters, rather drawn by you or cut from magazines, are another sign of you being a visual writer.

Visual writers can often push back writer’s block by sitting and studying something on a shelf. I do visual writing because I got the idea for my story about the toy maker just by staring at the horse marionette. If you get your best ideas when you are staring at something, rather it is a dragon figure or the model of a space ship, then you might consider decorations for your office that match that need.

What comes as a natural next for the types of writers? Physical. Do you get your ideas not when staring at the space ship, but when you get frustrated and pick it up to send it swooping through the office battling the ships in the posters on the walls? Do you like to dig out your child’s (no, really, they are the kids’s) building blocks and construct a space port for those little Lego men to explore and draw wonderful story ideas from that? When you are writing a scene for a sword fight do you find it best to get up and grab the broom (or that sword on the wall) and act out the stances? These could all be indications that you are a physical writer. Someone who’s best ideas and stories stem from experience.

And I suppose that experience could be considered another type of writer as well. Someone that writes best from experience might take archery lessons just so they can learn what it is like to be an archer. They might go camping when they want to write a scene about their hero out living off the land. I’ve been known to walk to the top of a mountain and sit with a notebook and pencil just so I can write down, first hand, what the view my characters would have seen was like. So I could get the tones of the mountains in the distance right, so I could get the feel of the breeze at that altitude right, so I could determine if the characters would see clouds below them or not in the valley and just how much detail they could see of the valley floor. Experience writers might join the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) or other living history groups just so they can immerse themselves in the sensations their characters would experience. They might be members of Live Action Role Playing Groups that are in line with the type of writing they do - some mystery writers, for example, probably jump on all the mystery train rides and go to all the weekend mystery dinner theater events.

So, now that we know more or less what we are looking for, can you better define what kind of writer you are? Me, I’m a visual writer with a touch of physical and a smidgen of experience. I like to sit back and stare at things until an idea clicks, but there are times when I have most definitely pulled that sword down from the wall and gone after an imaginary opponent to determine how that move would have been done. Or done a tumble across the floor to see if the hero really could roll up to that position I wanted them to. And I have immersed myself in experience a few times, needing to see through the eyes of my characters and discover just how something would have played out. I have danced with princes and stood shoulder to shoulder with warriors in battle (both when I was in the SCA).

Decide what kind of writer you are, find out what it is that makes you happiest when you are writing, and then use that knowledge to coerce the muses into speaking to you. Don’t be afraid to decorate your office with toys if they are toys that can help you to learn more about how an item found in your novel world might look or feel. Create your own props if you need to, I have scroll tubes and wands littering my work room in various stages of completion that will one day be proudly displayed in my office as decorations that can help me to coerce the muses to speak to me. It’s not about who has the most toys, it’s about who has the toys that will help them the most. Or the music collection, or the bottles of perfumes and other scents, or the maps, or… you get the idea, so get to work and build a truly muse inspiring office to work in - or at least a muse inspiring box you can pull down and look through when the muses have fled.

It is easy to say “I want to be a writer,” people say it all the time. What is not so easy is being able to define what kind of writer you are. I was sitting at my desk the other night working on this website when I looked up at the map on the wall over my computer… it got me to contemplating just what kind of writer I am.

Sure, I can classify myself broadly, very broadly, as a freelance writer. After all, I work for myself and write for whoever I feel like, but… what kind of writer am I?

Okay, so what we need to do here is narrow definitions down some. Right? I suppose we could go use some memes to find out what kind of writers we all are… here are a few of those and their results for me…

From Quizilla we get…

You’re a Mystery writer!
Take this quiz!

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and from OK Cupid we have…..

 

Your Score: Action film writer

You scored 55 commerciality, 51 application, and 50 torturedness!

Biff! Pow! Shazzam! You spend your time researching technology and weapons, and you love it. Your creativity stretches about as far as deciding what sort of gun the hero should have, and you wouldn’t recognise self-doubt if it popped a cap in yo ass.

Link: The what kind of writer are you? Test written by MrFlay on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Well now, I seem to be the violent type of writer, but then we all knew that (or at least anyone that has read my work knows it), but … have we really determined yet what kind of writer I am? No, we’ve just played around some and made some lovely time wasters that while I can justify that I needed those for this article, they really are just one more way to find online to not get around to doing any real writing.

So, let’s get back to the subject at hand, shall we?

continued in Part 2….

Well, it’s that time of year again, time to think about what you will be doing with your writing next year. No matter what you are planning to do with your writing, chances are you want to get a copy of Writer’s Market, but have you considered rather or not you are also going to be in the market for a literary agent?

Several years ago one of my sisters loaned me a copy of her Guide to Literary Agents, I found it to be indispensable for sorting through the confusion of finding a literary agent. At that time I was not ready for an agent, but the value I gleaned from that book has left me with the determination that when I am ready to find an agent, I will begin with the purchase of a current copy of the Guide to Literary Agents.

If you are in a position to be looking for an agent, or feel that you might be ready to look for one in the next year or two, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the Guide to Literary agents when you buy the 2008 Writer’s Market.

And right now Amazon.com has both books listed as discounted when you buy then together, so that makes it even easier to pick up the pair of books - or get them as a perfect Christmas gift for any writer you know to show them how much you believe in them.

I’m going to stick with this layout for my writing site, since I wanted to get a good four column layout and this gives me the look I was after, I still have to do some more refining to get things where and how I want them to look, but I think that it is starting to come together fairly well for what I was after.

I’m going to be letting the template building rest for a while now, and start focusing more on my other websites and on getting content for this one written up more.  I have some plans for what I wanted to do with this site, and growling about code and templates and junk is definitely not what I had in mind when I started building it, so time to send the code monkeys back to their  banan-filled break room and get back to letting loose the muses in here to let them chatter about writing once again.

I know they have a lot they want to talk about here, since the muses have hardly let me get any work done with all the jabbering that they have been doing - which of course, any writer can tell you, means that all of the writing muses will now flee and hide out least I make them actually help me write down any of what they have been buzzing on endlessly about.