A Writer's Life
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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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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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What I’ll Be When I Grow Up
Jokes everyone, I’m grown up already and I’d argue that I have been for a while. If 26 isn’t grown-up, I don’t know what is! But, recently I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do when I finish uni… and the more I think about it, the more depressed I get. I have a little under twelve months before I finish my BA next October/November, and, not surprisingly, what in the world I’m going to do after that’s all ticked off has been on my mind. I’m not feeling great about it. When I started studying, I felt pretty strongly that I knew what I wanted to do when…
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Wading Through Grief
One of the most challenging—and daunting—things as a writer is the knowledge that someone, somewhere, at some point, has already dealt with the things that you want to deal with in your writing. And probably done them better (just saying). As with most thinking associated with writing, I find this almost paralysing: what’s the point, then, of continuing to try? What can I, just one individual, bring to an idea or experience that hasn’t already been put into words—or music, or paint, or sculpture—and probably done far better than I could ever hope to do? So, as always, I’ll muddle my way through it and do the best I can.…
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Possible Hiatus
Not even a full day ago, I found out that my paternal grandfather had died. And tomorrow night I’m jumping on a flight to Australia, and I’m going home. I do not know when I will next write on this blog again. That’s not a ‘forever’ goodbye, it’s me recognising that other things need to take priority right now, such as supporting my family, allowing myself to grieve for the loss of such a wonderful man, and devoting myself to working on his biography so that it can attempt to do him credit, and so that he would be proud of it. For that reason, I wish to at least…
