Tag Archives: freelance

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you’re an introvert like me, you’ll want to read 5 Ways an Introvert Can Build a Thriving Audience Online.  And for a unique perspective on capturing personal histories, take a look at Photos of Very Old, Very Loved Teddy Bears.

  • The Dual Lives of the Biographer. “The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The first is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Netflix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served. The second — the life the biographer pins to the page — has themes. It has chapters, a beginning, middle and end. Intentions align with actions, which bloom into logical consequences.”
  • The Best Design Books of 2012. “From Marshall McLuhan to Frank Lloyd Wright, or what vintage type has to do with the evolution of iconic logos.”
  • Pranks, Ghosts, And Gore: Amazing Photo Manipulations Before Photoshop.”New York’s Metropolitan Museum is the largest (and at 150 years old, almost the oldest) museum of art in America, exhibiting some of the best examples of pre-Modern art this side of Europe. Which makes it a fascinating stage for a current exhibit examining the legacy of Photoshop, a tool that has done much to undermine traditional thinking about photography over the past decade.”
  • 5 Ways an Introvert Can Build a Thriving Audience Online. “Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, clarifies that introversion is different from shyness, which is a fear of social judgment. Introversion simply means you are more energized and at your best in less stimulating and quieter environments. So, how can introversion help you achieve world domination, how can you — the introvert — capture the hearts, minds, and trust of an audience?”
  • Photos of Very Old, Very Loved Teddy Bears. “For his MuchLoved series, photographer Mark Nixon has shot minimalistic portraits of some well-loved stuffed toys and collected their stories. Spotted by Laughing Squid and on view now at the Mark Nixon / STUDIO in Dublin, Ireland, here are some of plush friends loved a little too well. I mean, seriously, some of them are missing limbs and have their woolen little guts spilling out. That’s, uh, some lovin’ right there.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili.  It’s a feast for the eyes.  And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.

  • What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree.  If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life.  That’s because  stories are much more than events themselves.  They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
  • Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
  • Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
  • Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
  • Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
  • A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup check out the animated talk 5 Things Every Presenter Should Know About People. If you make presentations, I highly recommend it.  And for something creative and fun, be sure to watch Publisher Creates Inspirational Book Sculpture Video.

  • 10 Important Life Lessons We Learned from Children’s Books. “This week, one of our favorite children’s book authors and illustrators of all time, Chris Van Allsburg, turned 63. Allsburg’s books were formative literature for us as children, so to celebrate the author’s birthday, we were inspired to think about all the life lessons we learned from children’s books — both picture books and early chapter books — that still stick with us.”
  • 8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement. “If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.”
  • The Life Biographic: An Interview with Hermione Lee. “Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee talks about life-writing as a scholarly and literary pursuit: the fictions and facts that make up written lives, rules that can be broken, conventions that change and motives that remain the same.”
  • Participatory Archives: Moving Beyond Description. “Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext…Theimer spoke on the subject of participatory archives, highlighting the ways that archives can use crowdsourcing projects to increase user engagement and understanding, while also enhancing the information and resources that they provide.”

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Encore! Are You Charging Hamburger Prices for Gourmet Work?

Are You Charging Hamburger Prices for Gourmet Work? It’s not uncommon for those starting out in the personal history business to offer their expertise at rock bottom rates. And while this might be important for the first project or two, it’s definitely not a plan for financial solvency and success in the long run. How much are you charging per hour for your personal history services? To give you some idea of where your fees fit with others, I’ve compiled some lists. From PayScale here are … Read More

Encore! 10 Commandments for the Professional Personal Historian.

10 Commandments for the Professional Personal Historian. I’m not Moses or even a prophet for that matter. But I’ve been around for a while! As a freelancer for thirty years,  I’ve learned some key lessons that can be summed up in these ten commandments that I try my best to follow. Not always successfully!  For those of you starting out, these might provide a useful checklist. For the experienced among us, perhaps the commandments will be a  useful reminder of what we need to keep doing. What are your … Read More