Even turtles can fly.

I just wrote a short ebook about time management.

You can fill out the form over there to the right to grab a copy for yourself. And I believe a version of that form should magically manifest on this page any second now.

But between you and me, the whole subject of time management makes me a bit crazy. Measurements of time are pretty arbitrary to begin with. The whole hours and minutes thing is really just a way for two people to get to the same place at the same, uh, time. And that’s fine.

But it takes serious hubris to think you can manage time. If you buy into the whole time concept, you know that clocks tick and Earths turn with or without our intervention.

And it takes really serious hubris to tell other people how they should manage time. Before I wrote my little gem I looked at a bunch of books on the subject. Oh, lordy. The Oprah-ready clichés. The “now let’s get ourselves organized” systems. Systems! One system told me to create a time journal. Say what? Take the time to write about the time I just wasted? What a waste of time!

Sure, I found good stuff in every book, really helpful chestnuts like “Don’t procrastinate.” All dragged out over the very time-consuming course of 300+ pages.

Mine’s 28 pages with a lot of white space.

In the end, I fell back on my own experience along with advice I’ve gleaned from a cadre of really successful entrepreneurs.

See, I’ve been on an eye-opening journey the last few years, learning about Internet marketing from supersuccessful dudes like Chris Farrell, James Schramko, Yanik Silver, Jeff Johnson, and Eben Pagan, and copywriting from John Carlton and Robert Gibson.

These guys make most freelance writers I know look like distracted slackers—and the freelance writers I know are a hard-working bunch.

But times have changed, in case you hadn’t noticed. Writers can’t just trundle off on an assignment, write it up, move on to the next one, and call it a living. The pitch-and-pray model of freelance journalism is dead. We can either starve while we wait for overworked editors to ignore our pitches, or take matters into our own hands.

That’s what this blog and my little ebook are all about.

We’re entrepreneurs now. We’re small businesses.

We need to learn about focus, audacity, and vision from entrepreneurs who parlay those traits into big bucks.

We need to embrace new technologies—notice that my latest projects are an app and a Kindle book.

We need to learn how to market our work. No, not “brand” ourselves. We need to market and sell stuff.

And if we think of ourselves as artists, fine. I appreciate that writerly measure of pride. But I’ll end this post just as I end my ebook—with a quote from Steve Jobs:

“Real artists ship.”

“The thing that is scaring you the most is exactly what you need to do.”

I was listening to a podcast this morning—successful entrepreneurs James Schramko, Dean Hunt, and Peter Parks talking about what makes them tick. The question was raised: “What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back to when you were first starting out?” That’s when James Schramko came out with the line above.

Does this ring true to you? I bet it does. It rang like a gong in my ears. Every freelance writer knows what it’s like to dance around an idea as if it will somehow miraculously arise on its own and spontaneously come to fruition. Anyone who’s ever dated knows this syndrome.

But it’s one thing to serve up platitudes about breaking through your fears and blah blah blah. Everyone knows we shouldn’t be ruled by fear, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and so on.

This is a far more interesting point. James is saying that precisely…the very thing… you’re most afraid of…is exactly what you need to do.

So why does THIS particular task, concept, or story idea stand out as The Scary One?

Here’s one possibility: It’s your best shot. It’s the single thing that you absolutely know will most advance your career. Wow. The Big One. The idea begins to grow out of proportion. It takes over. It becomes your identity. If you sit on it, at least it will never get rejected. It’ll always be there for you to fondle, to look back on like a musty old memento. “One of these days….” But if you put it out and it gets shot down, your entire being would suffer. The end of life as you know it.

Here’s another possibility: The reason it’s scary to you is simply because you know it’s a dang good idea. Not a make-or-break-your-career deal. Just a solid idea. Some of the psychology above is at play, but really, the reason it’s scary is this:

Things will change when you act on it.

One way or another, things will change. Maybe that seems scary, but it’s GOOD. By definition, your life can never be the same once you take action on that One Scary Thing.

Same-ol’ same-ol’ is death to writers. We succeed by stretching, by trying new things.

So what’s scaring you right now? Different things are scary at different points in our careers. I’ll toss out a few possibilities:

• Writing your first query letter
• Following up on that query you sent out six months ago
• Pitching a big-time publication
• Asking to interview a source who will help you with a great story pitch
• Putting together a book proposal
• Writing an ebook
• Starting your own blog
• Quitting your day job
• Taking a writing course
• Trying a new avenue of writing: copywriting, for instance
• Creating your portfolio website
• Pitching a whole rash of stories to publications that pay real money
• Offering to guest post on someone’s blog
• Leveraging your writing in a new way, such as learning Internet marketing
• Continuing your education
• Attending a writer’s conference
• Teaching a course in writing
• Getting your clips together
• Revising some rejected stories and pitches to make them viable
• Buying useful reference materials that will help you write or market better

Whatever your One Scary Thing is, please realize that the second scenario is what’s true. It’s a dang good idea, not your identity. No matter what happens, your being will remain intact.

You’ll have more great ideas and you may stand at more Scary Thing thresholds. But each time you move forward anyway, you’ll become more successful.

You’ll change. You’ll grow. You’ll succeed.

The authentic globe.

I watched some of the Golden Globes the other night. Good thing the honorees weren’t trying to get writing assignments.

Have you ever seen so many displays of BS? Such unbridled pretentiousness?

I admire actors. When they’re acting. When they’re acting well. What they do is amazing. But when they can’t stop acting, when they ooze and emote and dramatize without any trace of authenticity, it’s embarrassing and off-putting.

Which brings me to a crucial point for freelance writers writing query letters:

Be authentic.

Don’t go all writerly on the poor editor. That’s what often happens when writers take their cue from the godawful books and blogs out there brimming with advice about how to write a query letter. Writers then think they’re supposed to adopt some sort of magical writerly tone, and follow a scripted writerly template for their pitch.

Those often manifest as gagworthy blunders like opening your query with your story’s lede. If you called the editor on the phone to pitch (a no-no, of course), you wouldn’t launch into reading your article without first saying hello, would you? Say hello. Be conversational. Say:

Dear Joe,

I’d like to pitch you a story about an emerging craze: penguin tourism. I call it “Waddling to Antarctica.”

See? Friendly but catchy. Authentic. Then spell out the gist of the story, refer the editor to some clips, and get outta there. If it’s a complex pitch, don’t worry about length. Spell out the gist and then set up the extra information with a subhed like “A Bit of Background.” But don’t make a simple pitch complex.

Even worse is when writers drop all sorts of clues that they’ve read the publication’s or the website’s writers’ guidelines in Writer’s Market. Like, “I understand you’re looking for exciting first-person accounts of challenge in trying situations.”

No editor is impressed one doodly bit by the fact that you read their (undoubtedly out-of-date) blurb in Writer’s Market. They’re more likely unimpressed to the point of hitting “delete” immediately. Editors are impressed by the fact that you’ve bothered to read their publication. (Drop hints!) And that you’re pitching the kind of story they actually need and want.

One other thing the get-published books and blogs have spawned: Blind adherence to every gospel word of a publication’s writers’ guidelines. If they say their response time is eight weeks, that’s just code for “We’re swamped. We may not get back to you for ages. If ever.”

Don’t be a chump. Follow up. Two weeks is fine.

Oh yeah: While we’re talking authenticity, don’t be so frigging important that you make a responding editor jump through antispam hoops to reach you. Duh.

I go into a lot of detail about other query do’s and query don’ts in Write Where the Money Is. But after seeing the Golden Globes, I had to get this off my chest.

Be authentic. Or an authentic person on the other end will simply change the channel.

Dave Navarro, aka The Launch Coach, spells it all out.

I’ve just created a new website that I think you’ll be interested in. It’s called EBook Secrets Rated: www.ebooksecretsrated.com. In it I’ve reviewed what I think are the three best books on the market about writing and marketing an ebook.

If you haven’t considered writing an ebook, you should. Ebooks can be hugely profitable for writers. As you know from reading Write Where the Money Is, I’m not a big fan of traditional book publishing, at least not for information products. I like the lean, mean, online approach. No hunt for an agent, no genuflecting to publishers. You’re your own agent, editor, and publisher.

But a word of warning: You’re also your own marketing department. And that’s where most ebook writers go awry. You have to learn how to properly launch and market your book.

The three books on my site tell you just how to do that. They are:

How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook

Ebook Secrets Exposed

How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook in as Little as 7 Days

Have a look at Ebook Secrets Rated and let me know what you think.

How do I fit 25 hours into a 24-hour day? Selena Templeton asked me that, essentially, in a recent comment.

I’m no paragon, but I’ve been freelancing successfully for nearly three decades. I’ve developed some approaches that I know work. Initially, they were survival mechanisms. Now I truly enjoy them.

Above all else, rid yourself of any delusional notion that you can multitask. The concept is a sham. It invites FADD: Freelance Attention-Deficit Disorder. Before you know it, you’re lost in the Twittersphere, following someone’s jokey Facebook link, reading The Onion, or looking for old Lucy bits on YouTube. (Gee, does it sound like I’ve been there?)

Next: Take care of yourself. You’re the top race horse in your stable, and you’ve got a lot invested in your health and abilities. Feed that hoss good hay. Let him rest. Work him hard! Then let him rest again.

I devote my early morning to meditation, exercise (as you know, I’m a bike geek), and a good breakfast. I report to work (my home office) on time. I answer the early e-mails. Then…

I build focused blocks of time in to my day. If you’re a part-time freelancer working at night, you might have just one session under the light of a midnight-oil lamp. All the more reason to be fully focused. Full-timers, you should schedule three to five dedicated time blocks every day.

During those times, schedule one task. One task only. Devote yourself to it fully for the entire time block. I like two-hour segments. Turn off your e-mail. Turn off your iPhone or Blackberry. Don’t be a slave to those devices, or to anyone demanding your attention.

You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish in one of those sessions. I can’t tell you how much I love them! And I work really, really hard during those time periods.

Don’t run overtime, even if you’re in a groove. Set a timer and stop when it dings. (I use www.online-stopwatch.com. That’s their hourglass image above.) Get up and stretch, breathe some fresh air, have a healthy snack.

Then, before your next focused-attention segment, answer calls and e-mails. Tweet. Cruise by Facebook. But don’t get lost.

Then back to focusing.

That’s the nutshell version. There’s more in my book. There I explain the concept of energy management versus time management. I’ll share more here, too, because I love this subject. I practice what I preach, and I know it works. But I also respect your time. Enough for now.

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Anyone else have surefire methods for managing time and energy? Share them below!

New Year resolutions are sewn with the seeds of their own demise. Why bother? Yes, goals are important, and we should articulate them. (I intend to do that any day now!)

But right now I’m feeling focused on…right now. Hence these better-than-resolutions that we freelance writers can accomplish today. Well, Monday, if you’re reading this on New Year’s Eve or on January 1. These are kick starts that just might engender some new work habits or bring us some killer jobs. But you don’t have to obligate to all-out personal revolution. Just try each of these once. See what happens. And let me know.

Let your idea brain go wild. Without editing yourself, write down a zillion article ideas. Stuck? Just dial in to your passion, whatever it is. The one thing you most love to do, to think about, to pontificate about. Decide you’re the world’s greatest authority on that subject (you are!), and start spewing ideas. Don’t think at all about crafting them into pitches. Yet. Spew. Go crazy. This isn’t homework you have to turn in.

Spend two consecutive hours focused on your work. Just try it once. Set a timer. No checking e-mail, no cruising by Facebook or Twitter. Two full hours focused on a goal, whether it’s spewing ideas, writing a query, researching a story, researching a pitch… Experience unbroken focus. If it feels good, do it again.

Thumb through a good book about writing. Glean a single tidbit and apply it. I just grabbed Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools off my shelf and read a chapter called “Save String.” An excerpt:

“…save string, gather piles of research, be attentive to when it’s time to write, write earlier than you think you can, let those early drafts drive you to additional research and organization.”

Great stuff, huh? We should always be gathering bits and pieces—saving string—for the project at hand, for future projects, for who-knows-what. But if we have an assignment to do, how do we know when we have enough information? Brilliant: Start writing! That’s how we find out.

Get up and stretch. I’m a reformed self–slave driver. I thought I had to muscle my way through work, and think constantly about it. Now I’m a stretcher.  Sometimes I need a timer to remind me to do it, but when I do, I do it. I focus only on the stretch, not the work I’m doing. It’ll still be there when I get back. Try it once, but make it total: Stretch. And don’t think about anything but the stretch.

Read some poetry. Good poetry. We may be nonfiction writers, but we have everything to learn from poets. Off the top of my head (okay, I’m looking at my bookshelf) I’d suggest Robinson Jeffers, e.e. cummings, and Emily Dickinson.

In Jeffers, see how his nouns and verbs sing, and how he deftly slips in an adjective only for rapier effect, truly like a weapon. So solid, so real, detailed, such endlessly interesting words—and not a whiff of triteness.

In cummings, admire the passion, the gush, the unbridled flow. And the musicality of his language. Here’s a man out of his head and into the rhythm of words—it almost seems like rhythm for its own sake. But the poet knows what he’s doing and what he’s saying. He employs rhythm. It does his bidding.

In Emily, read the last two lines of a bunch of her poems. Wow. Talk about kickers. See how she leaves us finished—yet lingering.

Obviously, if we wedged any of their poetics directly into our nonfiction writing, we’d get major “HUH?” responses from our editors. The point is, we need to get out of our narrow stylistic ruts and realize that deft use of language can make anything we write more interesting, more readable.

Pitch your dream story. And pitch it to a new publication or website. One you’ve long thought of pitching, one you’d sell your soul to get published in. Why wait? Do it now. Give it your all. Do all the stealth research I recommend in my book. Do it with gusto and confidence, unapologetically—you deserve to be in it. They’re lucky to have you. PS: You just might find the perfect idea to pitch in your list from the first nonresolution above.

Or in that box of string you’ve been saving.

"Great story...just needs a few revisions."

“I’ll have to get back to you. I’m in the middle of the rewrite from hell.”

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard that from freelance writer friends.

Maybe we’re skipping ahead a bit here if you haven’t even sold your first story yet. But you WILL cross this bridge. You will be asked to rewrite a story. You will be asked to rewrite the rewrite. You will go through hell.

Consider it a badge of honor, a rite of passage, or whatever cliché sounds the most consoling. Consider it consoling because being asked to do a rewrite means an editor has high standards, knows what he or she wants, and believes you are capable of producing that piece. A rewrite, after all, is NOT a rejection or a kill fee. We REALLY hate those.

You want to write for publications or websites with high standards. Online article mills, for instance, will never ask you for a rewrite unless you’ve somehow violated their terms of service. You’ve probably just offended some algorithm that generated an electronic rejection based on improper use of self-serving links or some such.

You want to write for publications or websites with high standards because they will improve your writing. You’ll be keeping good company. You’ll be surrounded by good writing, stuff written by writers who themselves have been through a few rewrites from hell. And ultimately you’ll get paid.

So what’s the difference between a routine rewrite and a rewrite from hell? That’s a subject I’ll dive into another time. Short answer: An editor who doesn’t really know what he wants, or how to convey what she does want, is indeed a messenger from the underworld.

But for now, let’s leave it at this: Suck it up and do it. Ask questions. Get clarity. Then feign graciousness and turn in the best rewrite you can. You’ll get another assignment. Yeah, and maybe another rewrite.

Welcome. You’re a pro now.