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Knowing Your Worth – Setting Prices as a Freelancer
There is something inherently empowering about knowing your own worth. A concept applicable in every aspect of our life, it plays a particularly crucial role in our professions… Especially if you’re a freelancer and you’re trying to break into the market. So today I’m going to talk about what you’re worth. And what I’m worth. And how to ensure we’re not being undervalued to help you safeguard your time and energy from being wasted. Now to someone just starting out as a freelancer, the buzzword appears to be ‘experience’. Everyone is familiar with the painful paradox that faces many school- and university-leavers. You need experience to get a job, but…
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Creating Habits to Achieve the Success You Want
One of the most mythical and mystical ideas in the standard human life is the concept of motivation; many of us see it as integral to finding success in life, to achieving our goals, to getting where we want to go. But the funny thing about motivation is that it’s also a slippery, capricious creature, hard to pin down, and even harder to harness to your will. The likelihood that it’ll be available to you when you require it in order to achieve your goals in the timeframe you want? Almost nonexistent. So we need something else; we need something that will bear us up and keep us on the…
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I’m a Blogger: what do I need to know about SEO?
Isn’t this the billion dollar question right now in an online world obsessed with being seen? I’m a blogger… so what do I need to know about SEO? Doubtless some of you are as-yet uninitiated into the overwhelming and bizarrely complex world of ‘trying to help other people on the internet find your content which (you assume) they really, really, really want to read and desperately need in their life, even though they don’t know it yet.’ Aka Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is a process by which websites and webpages (or blogs, as the case may be in this instance), fiddle around with a bunch of different aspects of their…
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A 2018 Renewal — Welcome to the Revamped AZ Pascoe!
Welcome, welcome, one and all, to my 2018 renewal project, my revamped blog! I recently decided it was high time I learnt something about Search Engine Optimisation and, while that may be a post for another time, in amongst learning about all of that, and dealing with some of my issues about blogging in general (check out ‘Creative Discouragement: The How and the Why’ if you want to read about my woes), I decided it was time for a blog renewal. Time for a bit of rebirth. For close to two years, my previous blog theme and layout has served me relatively well… But as a good friend (Nik Eveleigh—check…
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Creative Discouragement—The How and the Why
So, there’s a seriously big question about blogging that I’ve only recently discovered, but that I think might have been hanging over me for quite a while, and it’s this: Why do I become discouraged so much more easily about my writing/blogging than I do about other things in my life? If you read this blog religiously (I think there might be about two of you), then you might have noticed that I haven’t posted much recently. At all. I haven’t posted since we got back from Hawaii—and I regaled all of you lucky folks with tales of our adventures and recommendations for any Hawaiian trips you might have planned—about…
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Aussie Expats Update – Our Hawaiian Adventure!
Helllloooo everyone! I’m writing this blog post from my desk in chilly Lawton, OK, home safe and sound after a tumultuous and (predominantly) wonderful trip to Hawaii! It’s a long one, so if you don’t have the stamina, the short version is: we’ve ticked off another state, I am definitely a summer child, and there’s list of our recommendations at the end. Now, onto the post! Friday, 05 January. We started off less than ideally when we decided to spend Thursday night in OKC before our flight. It sounds like a good idea, right? WRONG: if you answered ‘yes’ to that question, then you are wrong. Now, it’s not your…
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My 2017 in Non-Fiction
Since I managed to spit out a ‘My Year in Fiction’ post last week, i thought it might be a good idea to create ‘My Year in Non-Fiction’ and, voila, here it is! To my shame, I didn’t read quite as many nonfiction books as I did fiction last year (I’m endeavouring to read more nonfiction this year, especially since I have a biography to write!), so I don’t have twelve to share. Instead, I thought I’d share just three of the six or so that I read—in part because I’m in Hawaii and I’m lazy and not overly keen to write a billion-word blog post, but also because there…
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My 2017 In Fiction
Hellloooo everyone! As we’re now firmly ensconced in 2018, by about 5 days—holy jeewillikers, how is that possible??—I thought it would be a really great opportunity for me to review some of the amazing books I’ve read in the past twelve months. Especially because James and I are currently winging our way to Hawaii (Hawaii everyone!), and I need to post more regularly this year (damn uni). I decided, when I conceived the idea for this post, that I would pick 12 total books to discuss (y’know, because there are 12 months in the year and that kind of symmetry just works for me)… And then I subsequently cursed myself…
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Aussie Expats Update – And What a Year it Was, A 2017 Recap
There is never a better time than NYE to do a recap of the rapidly-fading year (this is mostly just an excuse for the fact I’ve been meaning to put this together for a while, and I’ve been neck deep in that damn politics essay… and also Christmas food), and this year has been such a doozy, that I thought it would be wrong to miss the chance to very quickly the incredible adventures we’ve had. January. We had a relaxed January, knowing that we were heading off on the trip of a lifetime in February, but managed to fit in some fun anyway. We had James’s eldest sister Amy…
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Aussie Expats Update – Austin Adventures!
Well, I’m a little late off the mark (my politics essay hasn’t just been calling my name, it’s been shouting it and cursing to boot), but here is a recap about our amazing trip to Austin last week! We’re incredibly lucky to have family in the US and to have the opportunity to catch up with them while we’re living over here. Bill and Laura live in Austin and took care of James during his second half-ironman in October when I was back in Australia; he was so enamoured with the city he insisted that we had to go down for another visit when I was back… and last week…
