Hope the new year is treating everyone well!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting very sporadically over the last year. It’s entirely possible, though I haven’t counted, that I had more guest posts in 2009 than posts by me!

The good news is, nothing bad happened to me. 2009 was perhaps the busiest year I have ever experienced, and I put in motion several major projects that are just starting to take off now. Among other things, I accepted a position as a regular contributor at Outright Entrepreneur, writing about issues related to freelancing. Outright Entrepreneur is a project of Outright.com, the online bookkeeping system I’ve written about on this blog (Take Charge of Quarterly Estimated Tax Payments with Outright). The marketing director there saw my post here (and another at FreelanceSwitch) and after a short correspondence asked me to write for them. There’s a lesson there for anyone who’s wondering why freelancers should blog…

In addition to starting my new gig with Outright Entrepreneur, I also pitched, built, and launched an ebook publishing platform at Stepcase Lifehack. I wrote the first ebook, Back to Basics Productivity, based on a popular series of posts I’d written the year before on personal productivity. I also edited the second ebook (forthcoming this month), and solicited contributions for the third. I’m wearing just about all the hats – managing editor, marketing director, acquisitions editor, copy editor, layout and production – so you know it’s keeping me busy.

And so on – life happens.

The better news is, I haven’t abandoned this site. I love The Writer’s Technology Companion – the other stuff is my work, but this is my baby. I can’t keep up the pace I set in the first year of the site’s existence, when I was posting 3 posts a week most weeks, and sometimes 5 or 6. But I’ll try to post on an at least semi-regular basis over the coming months.

Another interesting lesson: Posting here was never all that hard, but a weird thing happens when you get pulled away for a while. The bar raises – not “out there” in the audience, but in your head. The longer I didn’t post, the harder it got to post. I felt… I felt like I owed my audience something special for their patience. And I didn’t have the time for that. Coming back to the site now means I’ve had to really come to terms with the imperfection that a busy schedule imposes. It means posting shorter pieces (and that really goes against my nature…) and posting sporadically and not always making a Grand Statement.

And yet another lesson: Though it’s been over a year since this site was regularly updated, I’ve lost almost no subscribers and, even more surprisingly, very little traffic. I attribute this to a conscious decision made early on to write posts that would come up in Google and other search engines, following the strategy I outlined here. A lot of the content on WTC is “evergreen” – that is, people are constantly searching for help on the topics I cover. And when they do, my content comes up.

And that’s the bottom line: to write what you can and have an audience for what you write. What more could I ask?

See ya soon!

Image by ilmungo via Flickr

One of the profound ironies about writing a site about being a productive, efficient writer is that the better I am at what I write about, the less time I have to write about it. The last couple of months I’ve been getting more work than ever, even while I struggled to deal with a difficult semester (my day job is teaching anthropology and gender studies to college students) and an even more difficult break-up and move.

My guest writers helped a lot – Aaron Peters, Kelly Kilpatrick, and Stephanie Stiavetti stepped in to take some of the load off as I got moved and then buried under end-of-the-semester grading, and I’m immensely grateful to them all. It’s been fun having guest writers on the site, and I’m definitely up for more.

The Writer’s Technology Companion has changed quite a bit since I started it. When I launched the site last March, I thought I would be primarily reviewing software and writing how-tos. Those kind of posts have been common on the site, of course, but I find that the ones I enjoy writing the most are the ones about being a more productive writer, and so that will be a bigger focus in the year to come. These posts take quite a bit longer to write, especially since – as anyone who follows my work at Lifehack will have seen – I’m struggling mightily with the notion of “productivity” and how to integrate efficiency, meaning, and passion in our lives. But I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit, even if it means slightly longer gaps between posts here.

To help fill some of those gaps, I’m going to try to do regular posts bringing together some of the best posts around the Internet on writing. I come across tons of great stuff out there, and it’s time I start sharing with my readers. Now, as a general rule, I hate link posts, so my promise to you is that I’ll never post just a set of links; I’ll always make an effort to bring some kind of value to the material I’m linking to, so that even if you never click a link, you’ll walk away with something useful.

Since goals and resolutions are on everyone’s mind as we move into the new year, I thought I’d start by sharing with you some of the great posts I’ve come across on that theme.

Better Resolutions for Writers

No-Fail Freelance Resolutions: How To Succeed in 2009: Jenny Cromie offers some great advice for setting writing goals for the new year. Especially welcome is her emphasis on spending some time to know yourself as a writer – check your commitment level and learn what motivates you now, so you’re ready when the writing flags and just about anything else seems preferable to working towards your goals.

“He shoots…he scores!” (or, writing goals): Jane of Seven angels, four kids, one family offers a crucial piece of advice to writers setting goals for 2009: focus on things you actually have control over. You can write the greatest work ever and the most stunning queries of all time, but in the end you cannot control whether your book gets published. “Get book published” might be setting yourself up to fail; “Submit manuscript/proposal to one publisher or agent every month this year” is  something you can make sure happens.

Writing Goals and New Year’s Resolutions Tips for Writers: Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen offers her take on writers’ resolutions for the new year. with a special emphasis on financial goals. Writers often ignore finances (which makes us especially easy to take advantage of, unfortunately) – if you want to make writing your life’s work, though, you’ve got to take the money side seriously.

Stress Relief for Writers: Four Ways to Achieve Your Writing Goals: Angela Booth tells writers to relax – and provides some strategies for doing so. Though many writers seem to thrive on chaos and deadlines, the reality is that our minds think and work best when they’re at peace. Clear your mind and let the ideas flow!

47 Ways Copyblogger Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions: Although this is primarily a “sneeze post” for Copyblogger (a “sneeze post” is a post written primarily to direct you to other work in the site’s archive – it’s a good traffic generating tool, but typically not especially exciting content), Sonia Simone provides lots of good advice for writers in between the links to other Copyblogger posts. And, to be honest, you can do a lot worse for yourself than to spend some time with Copyblogger’s usually excellent writing posts.

Top 10 Resolutions for Writers: A simple, to-the-point overview of the ten resolutions that should top a writer’s list of resolutions.

Ten health hazards for writers: Writing seems like a pretty safe work option, compared to say driving the ice roads of the Arctic or doing humanitarian relief work in a warzone, but it’s not without its own particular on-the-job hazards. Tumblemoose Writing Productions offers tips for avoiding 10 health risks that can stop your writing in its tracks. Don’t fall short of your goals because you’re too sick or injured to write!

And don’t forget my own post, How to Set SMART Writing Goals, which isn’t about resolutions per se but which has plenty to say about setting goals that work.

Image via Wikipedia

Congratulations to everyone who participated in National Novel Writing Month! With the end of November, you are either looking with glee at a 50000-word (or more) manuscript or sadly facing the fact that you just couldn’t make it to 50000.

Either way, you accomplished something meaningful — either you finished (or at least made a good start on) a major writing project, or you didn’t make it and learned some pretty important things about yourself as a writer and about how to manage your time, enthusiasm, and creativity to make it for the long haul. I admire the people who took the challenge, regardless of your final word count.

I hope the posts here have helped you in your efforts, especially the interviews with NaNoWriMo participants. I am grateful to everyone who answered the call — I really appreciate you taking the time to share your advice with your fellow WTC readers. My thanks to:

• Trisha Bartle
• Carolyn Dekat
• Sonja Faust
• Catherine Hicks
• Amanda Kendle
• Betty Punkert
• Whitney Rhodes
• Jon Strother

Let’s do it again next year, and more besides! In the meantime, keep writing. Have a happy holiday season and into the New Year.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Special thanks to Buzan Online, makers of iMindMap, for sponsoring the giveaway. Please visit their site for more information about iMindMap software or about mind-mapping in general.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s November, and that means National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short and harder to type), that wonderful time of year when writers and would-be writers throw off the bounds of sanity and commit themselves to writing a full-fledged novel in a month. And it’s not even one of the long, 31-day months!

I don’t write novels (not yet, anyway…) and I have other commitments for this month anyway, so I won’t be doing the crazy “March to 50,000 Words” that NaNoWriMo participants are engaged in. But I didn’t want to stay out of the game entirely, so I’ve decided to celebrate and support NaNoWriMo this year, even though I’m not technically taking the challenge.

Over the next month, you’ll find interviews with a good number of folks who have participated in NaNoWRiMo in the past, with their advice for hanging in and making your time count. (Special thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed!) You’ll also find tips and motivation from me on getting and staying productive — my hope is that naNoWriMo writers will pop by every couple days or so for a few minutes of advice before diving back into their works-in-progress.

Of course, Aaron Peters is continuing his series on Linux and open source tools for writers, which has been great so far. And we may have some other guest posts, from familiar guests like Stephanie Siavetti and maybe a new guest or two. And later this week I’ll announce the winner of the iMindMap giveaway!

So stay tuned all month — this is gonna be FUN!

Image by mark van de wouw via Flickr

Joining Stephanie Siavetti as my guest while I straighten out my move and get the site prepared for NaNoWriMo (I’ve got about 10 or so interviews with former NaNoWriMo participants to post already, and more coming!) is Aaron Peters. Aaron is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a free-software enthusiast. He has worked with Linux as a hobbyist since 1998, beginning with Slackware, Caldera, and Mandrake. He’s finally settled on Debian and Ubuntu for the last five years, all the while tinkering with programming in Python and Java. Aaron spent three years teaching English in Japan, and has held positions in international trade, consulting, localization, and web development, and currently works for an e-commerce development company in Allentown, PA.

I asked Aaron to take over the sit for a week or two because of his extensive knowledge of open source software, including incredible apps for writers like Scribus, the open source print layout app (a free software version of InDesign) and OpenOffice.org, the free office suite that has just released it’s 3.0 version. Aaron is also planning to post about using Linux, the free operating system, for writing. I’m hoping to pick up a few tips from him on setting up my own writing workstation using Linux, if I ever get all these boxes unpacked…

There is still at least one more post from Stephanie, and starting next week you’ll see some of my NaNoWriMo posts, but for the next little while, I’m giving Aaron full run of the site. Please join me in welcoming him!

This year, I will be meeting people I’ve worked with for a long time but never physically met, as well as folks I know as bloggers or on Twitter, and even a couple of people I’ve interviewed on the phone. So I’m pretty excited about that – and about hanging out on the show floor and talking with the vendors. I suppose if you run a blog about technology, even in the relatively small niche of technology for writers, it stands to reason that you’d get off on spending time talking with the folks who make all the neat technology that makes blogging possible. Plus, of course, when you’re in the midst of 3,000 or so bloggers, you are by definition among 3,000 or so writers.

If anyone who reads this blog is going to be in Vegas for the conference, let me know – I’d love to have a chat. Email me or send me a tweet on Twitter (I’m dwax). And hopefully I’ll have some cool stuff to talk about after the Expo.

So I’m swamped. But not for long, I hope — I’m hoping to be back soon with more tips, tricks, and advice. In the meantime, if you’re new around here, you might enjoy some of these popular posts:

• 22 Blogs Every Writer Should Read
• Build Your Blog’s Traffic and Impact with Resource Posts
• Word Passive Voice Highlighting Revisited: Now for Word 2003
• How to Set SMART Writing Goals

So, for a little weekend fun, I thought I’d ask: who are you? Are you a beginning writer or a more established one? Do you blog, and if so, where? What kind of writing do you do? What is your “day job”, if it isn’t writing? What are you interested in?

Let’s get to know each other a little better, ok?