If there’s one thing I know, it’s blogging. Having been doing it for four years I can safely say that blogging is what I do best. It’s also what made me forget formal article/essay writing for a while. So when I discovered NaBloPoMo yesterday, my ears perked up and my eyes got shiny. I know, bad analogy.

To be honest, I can’t even pronounce the abbreviation. It’s easier to say National Blog Posting Month than NaBloPoMo. After deciding not to participate in NaNoWriMo (at least it rhymes!), I came across this. Needless to say, I found it interesting! So what if I can’t pronounce it? It sounds like fun and it is completely doable!

I signed up today, but I registered my personal blog. For this blog, I have plans. And NaBloPoMo is not featured in them. Those ‘plans’ are that I have an open list of topics that I will be blogging about here. If I do the NaBloPoMo here, I’d run out of them and frankly not do justice to the posts. And I have this innate habit of rambling after a long day at work…and these days I am having long days thanks to the work that I’ve gotten (Post coming up on that very soon).

So, interested in my personal, non-freelancing life? Send me an email, tell me about yourself and assure me you’re not a stalker/plagiariser/antagonise-r and I’ll send you a link.

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This year was the first time I heard of NaNoWriMo. Alright, I admit, I was pretty out of it before I started freelancing. You can’t blame me! I was pursuing a bachelor’s degree! Having the time of your life in college is some serious hard work, you know?

I heard about NaNoWriMo at the Muse Conference where every one was talking about it and a lot of wonderful people kept trying to get me to sign up. I thought long and hard about it. I really want to sign up. But I haven’t. I’m going to sit this year out.

Why? Because I’ve never written a short story let alone attempt a 50,000 word novel! See how huge that number is? But If I’d known how to write fiction, I would have signed up in a jiffy. The other reason I’m not even considering signing up is that November will be filled with a lot of travelling this year. Okay so that’s as lame an excuse as the first one.

Here it is, the real reason: I am petrified. I haven’t had the time to process such a huge challenge. I’m not confident in my abilities to write fiction and I hate not reaching the finish line which means that if I don’t complete the 50,000 word I’d be berating myself endlessly and knowing me would steer even further from fictional writing.

So, next year I’ll be signing up. I’ll have worked on a story and plot, outlined my chapters, learned how to write dialogues that move the story forward, and envisioned a start, middle and end. Sound like a lot of work? Hey I know writers who are all geared up for the challenge! They have their pencils sharpened or fingers poised over their keyboards already in anticipation!

Next year I’m going to be one of them.

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You know how the minute you hit ’submit’ to something you get the best opening line of an article or comment you wrote which didn’t feel right yet you sent it anyway? No? Never happened to you? Oh dear! are those your pants on fire?

Let me save my pants by stating that it has happened to me enough times to merit a post about it. The first time it happened was my very first freelance article back home. I had agonized over the beginning of the piece for three days with no luck. The day the article went for printing it hit me. That perfect opening line. The hook that was needed to burst into the entertainment industry as an up and coming freelancer. That catch phrase that would have made my editor smugly claim me as one of her finds. But it was too late and I ended up as one of the many freelancers in the field who did just okay in her first published piece.

But this isn’t what this post is about. It’s about my latest miss of the hits and misses series. Darren Rowse of Problogger did a post in he invited his readers promote their blog in 140 characters or less. By the time I got to the post there were already 598 comments on the post. I randomly went through about 30. After the first few they all started sounding the same. Sadly when submitted my comment, it did too.

I sat with my fingers poised over the keyboard for nearly five minutes trying to come up with a sales pitch for my blog that was 140 characters long. I linked this blog to my name and came up with 140 characters alright.

The trials and triumphs of a newbie freelancer. The when, where, what and how much of freelancing as learned through practicing the trade.

Do you see what’s wrong with this? There’s nothing about the comment that is standing out. The ‘X’ factor is missing which would make Darren and other readers (those who make it to comment # 599) sit up and take notice. So what happens when I click on ’submit’? The perfect sales pitch arrives in my head.

Hi. My name is Samar Owais and ‘The Base’ is your beginning.

Sixty-four characters is all it would have taken to give my sales pitch that punch. The above sentence is cocky. It would have made people raise eyebrows as they’d have mocked the writer for her ignorance. It even has shock value. Seasoned freelancers don’t like anyone telling them that someone thinks they should begin again, which is what the statement will sound like to most. It has the X factor which separates me from the sea of comments.

Whatever their reasons it would have made people click on my blog which would have been linked under it’s name i.e The Writing Base. They would have skimmed it quickly to see what I was harping about with my bold statement at Problogger. And they would have found out that the blog was about a new freelancer who was struggling to find her first gig. They would have identified with where I am today.

Every freelancer has been where I am now. New to the field with little or no credentials I am every freelancer’s humble beginning.

The Muse Conference was a gold mine. It was hectic, it was crazy, I wasn’t able to keep up but it was still the best thing to happen to me as a freelancer. With so much to learn and so many workshops on offer I was high on information overload even before the conference had officially started! I was lucky to see a blog post about it in one of the countless writing blogs I was browsing in the beginning.

The different workshops in the conference touched on almost every aspect of writing. From how to inject humour in your writing to how to set up your website – it was all talked and taught about. All week long there were discussions and assignments in the forums and one scheduled chat per workshop which was a Q&A session.

The conference has been held yearly for three years now. And the best part about it is that it’s free. Not a dime was asked in fee. One would think that free stuff on the web are usually either scams or lacking in quality. The Muse however was neither of those. It was thoroughly planned and extremely well managed. There were rules for the presenters and the participants. All the chats had moderators and specific guidelines for people to ask questions.

The people who were hosting the workshops were published authors and successful writers with years of experience under their hat. The master mind behind this conference is Lea Schizas. I’ll be honest, I have no clue who she is in the publishing world except that she’s an editor for Red Rose Publishing. In fact, I don’t know who most people were there. Which was great because I wasn’t intimidated and freely asked questions.

As a newbie, I learned what I was already doing right, what more I could do and what else I can do in the future. The hand outs prepared by the presenters about their respective workshops were given about a month before the conference. The purpose of which was for us to go through them, learn and note any questions we have for the forum and chat. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t stop once the conference is over. A lot of workshop presenters have made it possible for us to contact them even after the conference with any question we might have. There’s also a weekly chat set up by Lea for the same purpose and includes mingling time as well.

Like I said, the Muse Conference is a writer’s gold mine.

Poverty is defined as ‘The state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions.’ How many of us have experienced this state? How many of us even know what it feels like to be dirt poor? So poor that you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from? How many of us have done something to help?

To put it in its simplest form. There are two kinds of people; those who talk and those who turn their talk into actions.

Talking about poverty is great. It builds up awareness, it sparks debate about what needs to be done. It also makes us thankful for all that we have. We feel the pain of homeless people, who get only one meal a day and have no idea where their next meal will come from.

We’ve all heard of Kevin Carter, the South African Photographer who won the Pulitzer for his photograph of a sudanese child trying to crawl to a United Nations food camp located a kilometer away while a vulture stood to attention nearby waiting for its prey to die. Carter’s suicide was attricbuted to the atrocities he saw while travelling through South Africa covering the apartheid. The man saw poverty up close and personal like we can never bring ourselves to see or imagine.

How many of us can bring ourselves to see this collection of pictures on poverty?

So we talk and we say how bad poverty is and how it should be brought under control or even eliminated. Yet what do we do to play our part in eliminating poverty? How many of us think sending money to charities is enough? How many of us make the effort to find out what they’re doing to help erradicate poverty? Some would prefer to help someone themselves and yet they don’t know how to do that.

One option is Kiva.org which allows you to lend your money directly to an entrepreneur in any part of the world. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Eradicating poverty doesn’t mean that you feed someone and put a roof over them. Those are short term solutions. What happens when you can’t support them? Kiva.org lets you empower the person you’re lending your money to establish and grow a business which will enable them to lift themselves from poverty. Once the loan is repaid, it can be lent again to another entrepreneur. In some countries a $100 loan can go a long long way.

So we’ve done the talking bit. It’s time to do something to help elleviate poverty.