When I left my reporting job in 2008 to travel in Africa, I had no idea there was a career-break movement. In fact, I didn’t even call what I was doing a career break. I wanted to take a long-haul backpacking trip, and quitting my job was the only way I could see to make […]
Want to make your editor happy? Here’s one simple thing you can do that will accomplish just that: Use hyphens correctly. Few people, it seems, realize that when two words become a modifer, they need a hyphen. Even if those words aren’t hyphenated normally. When they modify a noun, the game changes! That means job […]
Whether we feel fulfilled often has a lot to do with our work (and work can mean a lot of things), as well as how we balance our work with our personal lives. There seem to be two camps of thinking on this front: 1. Find a job you love, and do not settle for […]
Friday! And a spring Friday, which makes it all that much better. I hope you get away from your computer this weekend, but if you’re looking for online reads, here are my recommendations: If you don’t feel like running or writing, do it anyway, says Chris Guillebeau. “The days I feel bad about my writing […]
Eight months ago, when I blogged about feeling lost, a good number of you responded, saying you felt the same way. Your comments and emails made me realize just how universal that feeling is amongst people who are, by most measures, successful. So many of us feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied and yearning for more, even if […]
Readers sometimes write to me asking for advice on writing, social media or their job search. When I think that advice might be helpful to a broader audience, I like to share it here (with the inquirer’s permission). Here’s a note that hit my inbox last week: Hi Alexis, I just wanted to say how […]
As usual, links to keep you busy this weekend: Should you self-publish after a near-miss? From Writer’s Digest’s Jane Friedman. The Creative Penn tells all in this post about how much she’s made so far from her self-published book. Appreciate her transparency! What do you do when nobody’s looking? Inspiration from e-book entrepreneur Seth Godin. […]
Still not convinced you should use social media? Here’s what it can do for your blog traffic: That spike surprised me when I logged into my statistics yesterday. For some reason — because social media is a lot about making your own luck and a little about magic — a post I wrote in December, […]
I’m helping Think Out Loud, a radio show in Oregon, with an experiment: Can a few digitally connected people help a job seeker who’s not networked online? Carol Castle worked for a paper mill in Portland, Ore., for 25 years before getting laid off two years ago, one of the recession’s many victims. She has […]
It’s been nearly a year since I agreed to work with a literary agent for my travel memoir. My lovely agent has guided me through revisions, helping me strengthen my theme and story arc. She has, no doubt, helped me make my book better, all with the intention of eventually selling it to a publisher. […]