If you are interested in getting the full grant writing treatment, the gold standard is this course. It is the most frequently recommended course but it also costs 895$. I was actually willing to part with the money but the class is not online and the next time they were going to be in Atlanta is still months away. I looked over this free introductory course and it was good for a quick refresher but it is more of an overview than a course. I found an online course that I liked enough to sign up but I don’t want to recommend it until I have spent some more time with it.

I also came across a couple of well written books on the subject. Either of these titles will give you a solid working knowledge of grant writing:

Writing for a Good Cause: The Complete Guide to Crafting Proposals and Other Persuasive Pieces for Nonprofits

Getting Funded: The Complete Guide to Writing Grant Proposals

Good luck!

1. Just  start writing. I have always heard that the best experience for a writer is to sit down and write but it always annoyed me. Write what? Its like saying “just lose it” to an over weight person, easier said than done. Everything came together when I did some free writing. I had came up with an idea that I liked and I  sat down and said “what if this happened?” and started writing. Once I had that first scene it flowed into another and another until I had the beginning of my novel.
2. Don’t expect perfection. Cut yourself some slack. Professional authors do not write the book that you buy on their first attempt, why should you expect to? When you write, turn off your inner editor. That little voice that tells you that you are writing crap that no one will ever want to read. Write crap, write tons and tons of it, then during the editing phase you can go back and fish out the worthwhile bits, wash them off and turn them into your masterpiece.
3. Stick to your story. Writing your story will start out easy and fun and you will write thousands of words at a sitting. That is the honeymoon phase and its wonderful but soon it will turn into work. When you are getting into the middle of the story, you will start slowing down and it wont seem as fun. You will start thinking of dumping the story and starting a new one but your story is fine. You are just wanting that honeymoon phase back. Stick with your story and don’t abandon it. I went through the same thing with mine and some of my favorite scenes, the best ideas, came in the last half of my story.
4. Don’t sweat the details. For the first half of my book, I didn’t even have a name for my main character but I didn’t want that to stop my progress. I read some advice from an author that said when he got stuck for a detail, he would just type TK. That way, later in the editing, he could word search for TK and add in all the missing bits. I used that for my main character name and when I had it figured out, I just went back and added it in.
5. Have a goal. It really helps to have a tangible goal in mind to give yourself a sense of progress. I had the 50,000 word in a month goal but I also had a daily goal of 2000 words. If I had time to write apart from my normal  time, I would set sub-goals. For instance:  if I wrote 500 words I could get up and stretch, 1000 more and I could get a Dr. Pepper.
6. Write with a group. I entered this challege with four friends and my story would not be the same without them. We bounced ideas off each other, shamed each other into writing when we didn’t feel like it and kept a bet going to keep us motivated. So let me say thanks to Justin, Jesse, Jessica and James, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Well, I haven’t quite finished yet. I have 1,124 more words to go so I had better get at it.

I could just keep writing and adding description from here on but then I worry about the condensed sections, if I go back later and add water is it going to overflow and my book then be too long for the story being told? I guess we will see what happenes but  if you have an opinion feel free to shoot me a comment.

Hiring a website designer

 
A website has become a necessity if you want to be taken seriously in the business world. Knowing this, there are some web design companies that will take advantage of your inexperience. I overheard a conversation the other day while I was eating lunch. A businessman at a nearby table was telling a colleague about his site. He said he had paid 6,000 dollars for it already and when his friend asked what it looked like, he didn’t know. It had been in development for over seven months and they had yet to show him a mockup (a sample of how it would look). Since many people are unfamiliar with the process of creating a website, they cannot tell when they are being taken for a ride.

I have been in and around websites and their developers for years, so let me give you a few guidelines. Websites will vary greatly according to complexity and size. We will use a standard five page business website with no e-commerce (a shopping cart) and nothing complex. Many companies have a one to two month waiting period after you sign a contract with them but before the work commences. This is required for two reasons. They need time to finish the sites they are working on and they give you time to get your content together. A great number of web designers do not handle the written content of the site but we will talk more about that later.

After you get to the front of the line and they are ready to commence work, they will generally show you a mockup. This is a static page done in a program like Word, to give you an idea of how the site will look. When you are happy with the result, they begin work in earnest and a good company will have a site ready to go live in two to three months. That means there should be a maximum of a five-month turn around time for a simple business site. If it is taking longer then it is time to ask them to see what has been accomplished. Tell them it doesn’t need to work or be pretty but you want to see the work in progress. If they will not show it to you for any reason, it is time to worry. Also watch for the people who will suddenly get really busy and can’t be reached by phone for extended periods.

Let me go back to what I was saying about content earlier. It will usually be up to the client to write the content for the site unless the designer has a writer on staff. Generally the person writing your code is not the same person you want writing your content, you want someone specialized in writing for marketing and sales. Be careful that your designer doesn’t just cut and paste text from another website to put into yours. Not only does it irritate people like me, that do business writing for a living but plagiarism can get you both into legal trouble. There is an easy way to see if you are safe. I recommend a website called www.copyscape.com. You can go there and enter your web address and if there are any websites on the Net with big chunks of the same text, it will display them. As an example, try running mine through it, it is www.abusinesswriter.com. It should display one website because I recently changed my domain and it is pulling up my old site. Now input your website or input the sites from a particular web designer if you are thinking of using them. If more than a couple of sites come up, I would steer clear. By keeping a few simple precautions in mind, you will have no trouble finding a professional and honest web designer to build your web presence.

>>As an addendum to this article. I have been doing the writing for a company that I have a lot of trust in and recommend highly. If you are in the market for a website, check out Top Flight Websites.

RUN!!! LOL just kidding…my advice would be to define what success is to you and never stop until you achieve it. What is the goal of your writing? If you do not have an answer for that, sit down and think it through. Do you want to write a book? Do you write for the sheer fun of it? Do you want to entertain or do you want to make a lot of money? If you don’t have a clear idea of what success is to you, then you will never know when you achieve it. Set yourself small goals at first. Submit an article, take a class or just set a schedule to write for one hour a day and stick to it for a month.

Writing is hard and unless you are supremely talented, you will need to put in the hours to hone your craft. I read a article recently where the author said that writing a book was harder than giving birth. That was depressing. I have always been thankful that, as a man, I will never have to go through child-birth and now I am told that my career will visit far worse tortures upon me….goodie!. Even so, I won’t let that stop me from writing my book and you can’t either. Maybe not the child-birth bit but you get what I am saying. In a recent newsletter from Filbert Publishing, Beth Ann Erikson said it best, “If you give up, you fail.” Simple and direct. I like that. Every time you write an article, book, grocery list, death threat, etc, you are getting better. You will make mistakes, many…many…MANY mistakes but they are not failures. Those mistakes are bringing you closer to success and the only way to truly fail, is to stop trying.

I can vouch for the ambient lighting, the wire photo wall and the shed as office. they were easy and fun. Well .. I didn’t fully build a shed office I was a little concerned about security with all of the computer equipment it would have. I did like his layout though and I shamelessly recreated the parts I liked in my home office. This in turn led me to the door desk with file cabinet base pictured in this article. I thought that was a really great idea because now when i fill my desk with all the paperwork that i will never take the time to do, I have no excuse not to open the file cabinets and get organized. After reading through that article a few times, I saw a small link that led to my newest project because I had an old Xbox that I was about to throw away. It is a pain in the neck at the moment but I believe I can iron out the kinks in the next few days. So jump into a project and let your geek flag fly, let me know how it works out.

• Online Stopwatch - For obvious reasons. Even if you don’t normally write with a deadline i would recommend trying it out. It gives your writing an immediacy and forces you to think of new ideas.

 

• Q10 - This is a great no frill word processor and it works at full screen so it will block out the other distractions lying around your computer desktop. it forces you to focus on the story.

 

• Ywriter - Use this in conjunction with Q10. Ywriter is a great tool for organizing your story into chapers, story arcs, character bios and traits. You can be as detailed as you like.

 

Not only are these free but they are very portable. I havent tested Ywriter but i know Q10 can be installed as a portable app and then put on a memory stick. I carry mine on a lanyard around my neck so anytime I am near a computer and feel like writing I have everything I need. I also encrypt mine so if i ever lose it I dont have to worry about anyone reading my notes but I dont really remember how I set that one up. If i remember I will post the process later.

After all, I finally have a fully realized beginning and end so I am waaay ahead of the curve, right…Right? Wrong! I am running into a problem with the part between the beginning and end where little things like story and plot usually appear. I cant get a handle on how much needs to happen before the huge confrontation, how many subplots to weave into it, etc.

The people I dragged into this contest with me have had some great ideas and I am going to change my writing style, which simply terrifies me. I am a planner, so when I set down to write it is always with a clear goal in mind and I think that is why I hit a wall. Instead of a goal, I am going to write a stream of consciousness through the middle of the book. It might be interesting to discover a book instead of clinically mapping it out. I am going to turn off my internal editor, which is the hardest part for me to do. I am just going to type and see where it takes me. A lot of it will be garbage and I know that but when I go through my first edit I can excavate the small pieces of value and polish and mold them into my story. I am going to rip the backspace and delete keys off my keyboard now but I will let you know how it goes.