I make my living as a freelancer, which means I work pretty much every single day, all year long. My only breaks are brief visits to out-of-town family. Real holidays are rare — perhaps once every five years. Sound familiar? I suspect many of you are like me. We never …
There are a heck of a lot of opinions out there. Some days they come at you as thick as blackflies over Lac Ouareau on a July afternoon. Small, insistent opinions: some winging singly and some blackening the sky in noisy hordes. Some are meaningful and some mean well and …
I’d like to recommend two of my favourite books for writers, one ostensibly fiction and the other, not. Except that both are so idiosyncratic, so luminously zany, so full of revelatory insights, humour and poignancy, that generic boundaries seem to melt and what you take away from each is reaffirmation …
If you’re just starting out as a freelancer, whether you’re a writer or an editor, keep in mind that the only way to survive is to be brutally efficient — which means you will have no social life. You should, however, get a gym membership and use it, because you’ll …
I teach Creative Writing in the continuing education programs at both Ryerson and the University of Toronto. My students know that I also work as a freelance editor, so they often ask me whether they ought to hire one. Sometimes they even want to hire me, but generally I refuse. …