Tomorrow
I'm working on a longer post. Come back tomorrow.
How Freelancers Should Spend Their Weekends
"Monster."
Do not hide in your hole. Be in the world. Bear witness to nature.
How Some Guy Got a 7-Figure Book Deal
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
On book proposals ...
A good point amidst this drivel:
"During his presentation, he stressed thinking of your proposal like a business plan—because, really, that’s what it is."
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
How to Double Your Blog Traffic in a Month
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
In December of 2015, my monthly traffic for my Forbes blog was 63,469 total monthly visitors.
In January of 2016, my monthly traffic for my Forbes blog was 130,154 total monthly visitors.
The most popular post in January was: "See Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's Custom Guns Created by Jesse James."
Here's the first line: "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are box office gold, and they’re armed with a pair of Cisco 1911 firearms that were created by infamous customizer and reality TV show star Jesse James."
To date, the post has 57,310 views.
I got the idea for the post from RECOIL magazine's Instagram page. RECOIL's editor had instagrammed extensively from SHOT Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, including a photo of the Jesse James Firearms Unlimited booth.
I did some research online and ended up at the JJFU Tumblr page, which features the custom 1911's James made for Pitt and Jolie and includes photos of the pair of pistols, as well as the story behind them. The guns are especially interesting in part because Pitt's is engraved "BIG PAPA" and Jolie's is engraved "MAMA KNOWS BEST."
That said, the post would not work unless I was able to use, with permission, the photos of the firearms.
I emailed JJFU and asked if I could use the images. JJFU responded, including full-size versions of the images.
I wrote the post, adding in some relevant information -- Pitt's support of the Second Amendment ("I got my grandfather's shotgun when I was in kindergarten"), an old rumor subsequently dispelled by Pitt that he had built Jolie a $400,000 shooting range on their French estate, how James left Hollywood and ended up in the gun manufacturing business -- and hit publish.
Why was this post successful?
It was visual.
It was about celebrities.
It was about guns.
And after the post went live, JJFU promoted the post on social media.
Thanks again to Jesse James and JJFU for the use of the images.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
How to Find Your Spirit Animal
"My favorite part is about the dog shit."
January Blogging Self-Analysis
"lol"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
A Self-Analysis of Blogging During the Month of January
# of Posts: 30
Positives: Only missed one day
Negatives: Self-indulgent ramblings of a nonsensical person who occasionally, halfheartedly tries to be helpful
Conclusion: Need to rethink this
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Angie Get Your Gun
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I wrote a Forbes post about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's 1911's custom crafted by Jesse James:
In 2014, Pitt, who was born in Oklahoma and raised in Missouri, shared that he grew up with guns:
“There’s a rite of passage where I grew up of inheriting your ancestors’ weapons,” said Pitt. “My brother got my dad’s. I got my grandfather’s shotgun when I was in kindergarten.”
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
In Praise of Breaks
"🐬"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I spent the first half of the day feeling vaguely anxious.
I was forgetting something -- but what?
Even at the manatee park, where I leaned over the fence, and watched the thick bodies of the sea cows surface and submerge, their tough hides scarred with propeller grooves, their heavily-breathing noses peeking out of the water making the whole place sound like a call center for dirty phone callers, I couldn't keep trying to remember what I wasn't doing.
It wasn't until I got home, a small manatee finger puppet in hand, that I realized what it was.
I needed to blog.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
How You Feel When You Have a Productive Week as a Freelancer
(via This Isn't Happiness)
Your Doubt Monster Must Die
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
You: Creative, affable, well-intentioned. Bipedal. Humanoid.
Doubt Monster: Hostile, unclean, ill-mannered. Globular. Origin unknown.
Challenge: You sit down to create. The Doubt Monster extracts itself from the hole in the floor, drags itself across the carpet, and fondles your ankles. Progress stalls.
You: "Doubt Monster, go away."
Doubt Monster: Unintelligible.
And so it goes, you and the Doubt Monster. It climbs into your lap and tries to stick its fingers in your mouth. You push it away, and it flails on its back while mewling plaintively. You take a break, and it leaps up into your chair and bangs on your keyboard until it breaks both the B key and the L key. You push it out of the chair, trick it into going in the backyard by luring it with a piece of overripe sandwich meat, and knock it into the man-made lake. You watch as the bubbles surface, then stop. You go back inside, you lock the door, you return to your work. Is the Doubt Monster alive? Is the Doubt Monster dead? Who knows. For now, it is not where you live.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
The Daily Journal
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
There's a really lovely piece in today's WSJ: "The Power of Daily Writing." It's about a man who's been journaling since February 24, 1964.
His first entry began:
“I have decided to be a writer. I will it, thus: I am a writer. Now—by definition if for no other reason, writers are distinguished chiefly by the fact that they write. I must write—two hours a day until I finish school.”
On day 27 of my endeavor to blog every day this year (I already missed one day, but, oh, well), I've found the process to be most beneficial.
Here are a couple tips I'm learning along the way.
Start early
Do your writing early in the day. It's easier to access the unconscious that way. You will tend to write faster, better, and from the heart. As the day goes on, your willpower to resist revealing yourself grows stronger, and you lose your connect to the dreamscape of your psyche.
Make it matter
There's no point in writing every day if you do so without bravery. Write about things that make you feel imperiled. Make a fool out of yourself. Confess secrets. If you never risk anything, you're not evolving, and if you're not evolving, your wasting your time on this planet.
Experiment rigorously
Yesterday I posted a comic I drew on a dry erase board hanging in the garage. The comic took me maybe 20 minutes to do, and after I photographed it, I erased it. That allowed me to create, but in a way that seemed to use a different part of my brain. Because I write so much, seeing something externalized visually was newly cathartic. Also, I thought the comic was sort of embarrassing and crudely done, so it was good to share it, despite its lack of perfectness.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Drawing as Therapy
"Haha I'm an artist"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I was having a hard time getting started writing today so I went in the garage and made this on the dry erase board.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
In the Depths of Winter
Photo credit: Harry Callahan (via This Isn't Happiness)
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. —Camus (via Clayton Cubitt)
About five days ago, I stopped eating sugar. I don't eat a lot of sugar, or sugar-like things, but I stopped it altogether. It was making me crazy, having all that crap in my system. Now I feel about 50% less insane.
Since, my dreams have been much more vivid. In most dreams, I'm dying. The cancer has returned, the cancer is in my heart, death is inevitable. The dreams aren't about "cancer" or, really, "death," for that matter. They're about dying. In the dreams, I'm always managing the process of my mortality.
The project upon which I'm spending most of my time is focused on a kind of resurrection. You go into your past, you dig up the bones, you sift through the dirt for whatever you've lost. You mourn, you wonder, you move on to the next hole. You get tired from the shoveling, but it seems like some part of it is worth it: the shedding, the unpacking, the letting go.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Work Advice from Halston
"Halston."
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I went and saw this Halston show today. Obviously: very fly. The thing that struck me, being in proximity to the pieces, is how relevant they are to what we're doing. The acronym: KISS. Translation: Keep It Simple Stupid.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Failure Is Inevitable
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
You said it, Backhoe Failure Meme Generator
Tragically, I forgot to blog yesterday. Originally, I set out to blog 365 days this year. Yesterday, I failed to do so. Although, after setting my goal for the year, I realized it was a leap year, so I can still blog 365 times this year. Regardless, I failed in the consecutive department. Disappointing.
Relapse is part of recovery
I guess addicts use this to differentiate between I AM WINNING and I AM FAILING. The truth is that you're probably doing either neither or both at any given time. I figured I would probably forget or fail to blog at least one day this year. And that's exactly what happened. It's not an anomaly. It's an inevitability. Accept it.
Success happens when you set yourself for it
I set myself up to fail. I didn't automate my blogging. I didn't pick a daily time to do it or pick a daily time by which to do it by. A couple times, I almost forgot. A pattern emerged of nearly not doing it, and I didn't act quickly enough to change the pattern. If I'd decided to, say, blog every day right after I woke up, or blog every day by noon, or had the word BLOG tattooed to my forehead, I wouldn't have fallen from my consecutive days perch after 21 days.
Meditate on mindfulness
I've had a good amount of success in the past from meditating. Just 10 minutes a day, prone wherever, thinking as hard as I can about nothing. This is a way to give your mind a break and reset itself so it doesn't go careening off the side of the road and run into a tree and eject you into a lake. I resumed meditation today. I will meditate 10 minutes a day. You should, too.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Automate Everything!
Image via Cartoon Snap!
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I've become oddly obsessed with automating shit in my life lately. Oddly because I'm not a robot, and I mostly think the whole quantification hack zone is a bog of absurdity. That said, I've had wild success improving my credit rating over the last several years in part due to automation. In 2010, I actually didn't have a credit score. I didn't have credit cards, and I guess this just meant I was not even in the credit zone. But in part because I went from paying bills late to auto-bill pay, I now have a credit rating of like 758 or something. You know, it changes a little, but it's somewhere around there. How great! How unlike me. Credit card companies now up my credit limit. Who would've thought such a thing was possible.
In any case, for the last couple weeks I've been walking around trying to automate other shit in my life. For example, last year was a real failure in terms of body management. Like, I worked out inconsistently and I followed a good diet inconsistently and I did these exercises I have to do inconsistently. This isn't good because I don't want to get sick again, and it means sometimes I feel like shit and sometimes I don't, but mostly it means that I feel like I don't have any control over anything, most importantly the meat within which I'm encased. So this week I prepaid and prescheduled some Pilates classes, and I'm hoping that will help. I also walk. Which is better than you'd think. If you can manage to get yourself out of the house.
Thanks to my friend Damon Brown for mentioning this blog in his Inc. column recently: "5 Simple Ways to Kill Procrastination Today." I was entranced with this line by James Clear: "Find ways to automate your behavior beforehand rather than relying on willpower in the moment." Willpower is like trying to harness the wind, so I guess I'm trying to take the guesswork out of everything. But I have to say, I am currently failing at taking the guesswork out of writing or creative production, which feels like herding chickens, only the chickens are made of words, and they are covered in a thick sheen of Crisco. In addition, I failed to get a Forbes post up last week. Admitting this is me trying to shame myself into getting it done.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
How to Blog Every Day
Manifesto of a Doer via This Isn't Happiness
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I almost forgot to blog today. In fact, I was in bed when I realized I had not yet blogged. So I got out of bed to blog.
Some days, I write a "B" in ink on my left hand to remind myself not to forget to blog.
I'm blogging 366 days this year. It's only day 20, and I have 346 more to go. (It's a leap year.)
It appears that I've been following Rule #12 of Manifesto of a Doer, which I discovered on This Isn't Happiness today.
To wit:
"Sprint. Rest. Sprint. Rest. Human's get more done in bursts followed by rest. Getting things done isn't about who does the longest hours, but who does the smartest hours."
Lately, I've been very, very smart.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Walking Is Like Meditating
"Walk"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
I went for a walk today because I try and do a walk almost every day and many days I fail but I keep trying. On Friday and Saturday I got a lot of work done on this book proposal I'm working on and Sunday I had a headache so bad that I spent the day in bed. By Monday the headache was lingering around the edges and then leaving.
Today was the first time that my head didn't feel like splitting open like Zeus birthing Athena straight from his skull which must've been painful for him but thankfully Hephaestus was there to help him and I almost had like a hangover from the headache.
Eventually I decided to go for a walk where there were clouds and trees and some otters that barked and hissed at me from under a bridge while I half-dangled myself over it to watch them.
I get some of my best thinking done when I am walking, I think. At this point I was able to go through the part of the book proposal I'd done piece by piece and put it together like a quilt and better visualize how it works as a totality.
I wondered while I walked home if you can think more clearly in this situation because everything shifts in perspective and you are not the god in front of the machine but the tiny figure moving through the world which is so very very big.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
This Is for the Ladies
A panel from "My, My American Bukkake, Too"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
Yesterday, I blogged about art, and the other day I came across this comic I did years ago, "My, My American Bukkake Too."
There's a "My, My American Bukkake" comic I did somewhere, I just need to find it. Then I should scan it and upload it.
I can't really draw, so I made this comic using photos I took on the set of a bukkake porn movie shoot that I went to in the San Fernando Valley.
Reading the comic today is pretty weird. It's sort of terrifying, and in a way still totally relevant, and makes me appreciate my ability at that time to not really give a fuck.
There's this idea floating around that women aren't funny -- at least in part because they're not willing to make themselves look stupid.
Sometimes, I suffer from this problem. I know there are times when I've done improv and hesitated because I was thinking, Are my pants going to fall down if I do that? Or some shit like that. That gap = awkwardness = The Not Funny Valley.
After I took the photos from the bukkake shoot, I uploaded them onto my computer, and I ran them through this Photoshop process called Stamp, and then I did what I referred to at the time as "messing with them," which is to say I took out some of the white, and I shaped some of the shapes, and I added back some of the black. Then I added the text. And, voila, a comic.
Of course, today, I can see all the things I would've done differently. The images are sort of too small and squished in some ways, and the white on black writing is practically unreadable, and I don't like how some of the prose is sort of poetry-ish.
But whatever. When it comes to bukkake comics, it is what it is.
I think if a young female journalist asked me for advice -- mostly, I just hear from guys in India who want to be porn stars -- I would tell her to make a lot of mistakes in public.
Be dramatic. Do insane things. Imperil yourself. Lose your mind.
Don't be this guy. Be this guy.
Or, better yet, be this chick.
Stop worrying about content and what your dipshit peers will think and who you may or may not offend on social media and whether or not someone will google you in the future and give you or not give you a job because those jobs will kill your soul anyway.
All of those things are things you don't need in your life. They are the things that come from without, not from within. And that's what matters: What's inside of you. That is the stuff of you.
Everything else is bullshit and a waste of time in a short road that we call life that dead ends in the cul de sac of death.
Go bravely to it, not as a coward.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
The Artist
"My art."
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
Years ago, I did some comics that were in some anthologies. I made this drawing on a dry erase board last year. I should make more comics. It's a good way to think more about images, and less about words.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.