The Renegade Writer Blog

We decided to relocate our blog to a valuable piece of virtual real estate called TheRenegadeWriter. Please change your bookmarks and come on over! We were able to archive all of our old posts, and WordPress, which is Open Source blogware, gives us a lot of cool tools and more functionality.

We hope you'll join us for the fun!

Last night I was chatting with Linda on the phone. She mentioned she was feeling stressed because she had 30 e-mails in her inbox. I said, "Only 30?" I admitted I had 2,000 in mine. By comparison, I should be climbing the walls, screaming out jibberish only other lunatics can understand. "You should delete them," Linda said. "You're never going to read them all."

This morning, I took the plunge. I highlighted all the messages pre-January 1, 2006 and hit delete. Goodbye Clifton Kareem, messages asking me "R U 2 Small?," and press releases from companies announcing new vice presidents of human resources. Roughly 1,000 messages vaporized. And damn, it felt good. Tonight I'm going to do a couple hundred more. You know, a mini-high ... just a couple tokes to keep the edge off. Woo-hoo!!

P.S. Yes, I have filters. Spam filters, too. I'm just a big fat lazy piler.

***Our blog has moved! You'll find more great tips for your renegade writing lifestyle at the Renegade Writer Blog. ***

This week I bought three magazines at Borders I may be interested in pitching. Total cost? $14.48. Ouch! To riff off Leona Helmsley, only fools pay newsstand prices, but I really needed these magazines, and I consoled myself that I'd be able to expense them on my taxes.

I don't think I've ever read any money-saving tips in articles about how to save major bucks buying magazines. We talked about it briefly in the Renegade Writer, but since then I've picked up some new tips. Let's break them into three categories: cheap, cheaper, cheapest.

Cheap:

-- Check your Sunday coupon supplements. Occasionally you'll find a cents-off coupon for magazines like Woman's Day and Family Circle. The coupon is usually for a certain issue, but other times, it's good for six weeks or so. If you want to buy a couple issues for market research, it may be worth raiding your mother-in-law's coupon caddy for extra coupons.

-- Use cash register coupons. When I buy magazines at the grocery store, I frequently get a store coupon to use on my next purchase of a similar magazine. For example, I buy Fitness and get a coupon for 50 cents off my next Self.

-- Send the magazine's SASC for a year-long subscription. You might as well get a whole year for what you'd pay for three newsstand issues.

-- A bonus tip for the super thrifty: Check your subscription's start date. I've sent in subscription cards from a January issue, yet the publication will start my subscription effective with the December issue -- occasionally November! Call the magazine and ask that they change your start date to the February issue -- or even the March if you purchased February on the newsstand.

Cheaper:

-- Buy subscriptions off eBay. I've found some fantastic deals here. I got three years each of Parents, Parenting, and Child for $9.78. A two-year sub to Reader's Digest for $9.98. Yankee for $8.00. You get the idea. I buy only from sellers/brokers who have excellent ratings, and I haven't run into problems yet.

-- Mine your professional affiliations. I'm not a member of ASJA, but I hear they have an excellent magazine subscription program for member/writers. I get subscription offers from magazines because I teach at a local community college: for example, I just got an offer for a year's worth of The New Yorker for $20 (or something like that).

-- Use your frequent flier miles or rewards points to buy magazines. I've used American Express rewards points to buy dozens of magazines, and when some of my United Mileage Plus miles were about to expire, I traded them for subscriptions.

-- Check out the following websites for cheap magazines subscriptions: MagazinePriceSearch.com, Discountmagazines.com, netmagazines.com, and amazon.com. Or Google "cheap magazine subscriptions" -- you'll get thousands of hits.


Cheapest:

-- Read magazines online. More and more magazines are putting their content on the web. If you're simply reading these publications to figure out what kind of stories they like, or you're already familiar with their demographics (I like to look at the actual magazine when I'm doing market research), web-based reading costs you nothing but bandwidth.

-- Steal them. Well, let me clarify that. Steal them from doctor's offices, your mother's coffee table, your brother's lad mag stash ... that sort of stealing. Occassionally I'll see a magazine that I've never seen at the newsstand, so I turn on the charm and ask if I can borrow it. I've never been turned down.

-- Read them at the library. This is what Linda does. My local library has subscriptions to at least 200 magazines. They don't even charge late fees if I'm late returning them!

-- Log into a database. Back to the library -- in Massachusetts, any resident with a library card has access to some amazing magazine databases, including Gale Group, InfoTrak, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and more. While I still subscribe to dozens of magazines, I've been able to dump hundreds of back issues from my library. If I want to find out what Parenting has done on potty training recently, I can search InfoTrak.

Any other tips you have to save money on magazines?

I am a fan of Anthony Bourdain's writing, as well as his food shows, so I eagerly dug into his Salon article about his thwarted experience filming in Beirut.

The surprise, for me, came at the end. My younger brother, Matt, is a Marine who's stationed in the Mideast. We just found out a couple weeks ago that he was relocated to Cyprus to help ferry people out of Lebanon. I got one short e-mail from him last week saying he was pretty tired from carrying babies around all day.

And today I read Bourdain's words. After he, his crew, and the rest of the refugees are man-handled by the embassy staff, "... we are put in the charge of the sailors and Marines of the USS Nashville who've hauled ass from Jordan on short notice to undertake a mission for which they are unrehearsed and inexperienced. Yet they perform brilliantly. The moment we pass through the last checkpoint into their control, all are treated with a kindness and humanity we can scarcely believe. Squared away, efficient, organized and caringly sensitive, the Marines break the crowd into sensibly spaced groups, give them shade and water, lead them single file to an open-ended landing craft at the water's edge. They carry babies, children, heat-stroke victims, luggage. They are soft-spoken, casually friendly. They give out treats and fruit and water. They reassure us with their ease and professionalism."

Anyway, I'm sitting here all teary and proud. Bourdain mentions none of these guys looks older than 17; indeed, my brother can carry all sorts of crazy-ass weapons on behalf of the U.S. government, but he can't legally kick back with a drink at the end of the day. So if you're reading this Matt, Friday Happy Hour is in honor of you. Nice job. :-)

This week I'm re-reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. OK, I'm fibbing. I'm attempting to read it for the 11th time. Not that it's boring or poorly written; there are paragraphs in there I want to etch on the inside of my eyelids! Everything he writes makes perfect sense. But I seem to lose steam around the middle when I realize what a freaking lot of work it's going to be, and I go right back to my slothful ways.

In a nutshell, to become more productive, you have to get a handle on all the "open loops" running through your head. All these random bits of information and nagging worries zap the energy you need to be fully productive. You need a black-belt in productivity, to paraphrase what he preaches in GTD. You do this by collecting, in one place, everything that needs your attention in your life: projects, ideas, to-do lists, forms, crumpled up sticky notes, assignments, etc. Then you sort through them and decide how you're going to act next: do you toss? File? Act now? Or in the future? Then you take action, either by tossing, filing, doing, or scheduling. The key is to get everything in your life into a system so that you can focus on your work at hand without being distracted by worries or wondering, "Did I forget to call Mom on her birthday?" When you work the system properly, you won't forget to call Mom, and you'll do a better job staying focused on what's important to you at that moment. (Wikipedia has a "Getting Things Done" entry, which gives even more detail. Also, check out 43folders, Lifehack.org, and Allen's company website.)

I'm fired up to give this a go ... for the 12th time. I'm curious: are any of you GTD fans? How has it helped you with your writing career? Did you fully embrace the system or just take what you need? (I'll probably fall into the later category, but Allen seems okay with that. I hate it when authors say, You have to do things MY way or the highway.)

I hope to report back in a few weeks about my improved productivity! :-)

If you're curious about a certain agent's selling record or you want to keep tabs on what your favorite book editors like to buy, Publishers Marketplace has a handy new tracking tool called Deal Tracker. Deal Tracker lets you specify a list of agents, agencies, editors, and/or publishers/imprints to track. Each time you visit the page, you're updated on all the deals posted since your last visit. Very cool!

You must be a paying member of Publishers Marketplace to use this cool tool. If you're an author or a wannabe author, the $20 monthly fee is seriously worth it, IMHO.

Ok, forgive the horrible Supremes pun. It's Friday -- my day off -- and I've been chained to my desk all day, trying to catch up on work. I'm about to leave the office for a little ice cream and blueberry picking. Yum!

When I was at the Chicago One on One conference, a couple people inquired why I unsubscribed from Freelance Success, and I explained how I'd done a time-study on my workday. Very enlightening. My study showed I was spending way more time discussing Tony Soprano's inner demons with fellow writers than exorcising my own demons through writing.

So another great post from Lifehacker today shows one way to map your time so that you can carve out more time for projects important to you. Like making money.

Have a great weekend. To paraphrase the other Diana, I've got this burning yearning feelin' inside me for ice cream.

The Lifehacker blog posts their list of 10 cheap or free tools that can boost productivity, along with several awesome ideas I've never considered, such as using my cell phone's camera to "remember" things.