I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Hi Tom,

My name is Hannah, and I live in San Antonio, Texas. I found your web site when I typed technical writing in google.com. You have a beautiful family.

I am a part-time Accountant for a non-profit organization. I do not enjoy accounting and the desire to write has always been a part of my soul. My desire to write burns in my heart daily. The part-time accounting position pays the bills, however I need to find a way to obtain a writing position in order to fulfill my desire, and help my husband keep a roof over our heads. Do you have any suggestions of where a bored, hungry to write accountant can find work writing? I am also looking for a way to work from home. Currently, I work from home one day per week, and the other 3 days on site. Do you think you could help me?

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Have a great weekend!

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of Jane’s Blog Carnival. The theme this week is the movie Some Kind of Wonderful, a classic 80s high-school movie that my wife quotes from daily.

In one scene, the main character, Keith, intentionally sets off a fire alarm to land in detention, hoping to sit near his daydream love, Amanda Jones. It turns out Amanda — unbeknownst to Keith — sprung herself from detention through her flirtatiousness with a teacher, leaving Keith to endure detention alone, with all the other deadheads. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival, currently underway in Austin, Texas, until March 16, is one of the most popular, high-energy tech conferences of the year.

This Interactive conference “celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.” Basically, everyone who is doing anything cool on the Internet ends up speaking there. 37 Signals, Facebook, Wired — they’re all there.

Many of the presentations are interactive panel discussions. Everyone twitters and blogs and texts during the presentations, etc. It’s like a gathering of the Internet geeks and hackers and designers and content creators.

Important: Because almost every session is recorded and distributed practically the same day, you can start attending sessions yourselves. Here’s a list of all the feeds available.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve come to a conclusion about blog posts. Bloggers write at least two kinds of posts: knowledge posts and creative posts.

Knowledge Posts

Knowledge posts involve documenting what you already know. For example, the last two posts I wrote on my blog — methods for recording presentations and software demos — were knowledge posts. I personally didn’t learn anything writing about them. It was merely an act of documenting a specific knowledge for future remembrance. These kinds of posts bore me. But they are valuable as a way to remember knowledge and share it with others.

Read the rest of this entry »

We writers tend to have a romantic idea about a creative muse that comes and goes, whispering interesting ideas to our minds.

But the idea of a creative muse is, I’m pretty sure, no more magical or mysterious than the same process by which we remember dreams. Ultimately, the more we write down our dreams, the more our brain learns to remember dreams. Similarly, the more we write, the more our brain [creative muse] starts thinking of things to write about.

This idea is not revolutionary, but it runs counter to advice some give against daily blog posting. In my experience, if you write regularly, the quality of your content won’t degrade; instead, your muse will speak more clearly.

Read the rest of this entry »