I haven’t spread link love in a few weeks. The following links were my food for thought this week when I finally managed to catch up (somewhat) with my RSS feeder.

The Renegade Writer has two posts that had me going ‘hmmm’ for a couple of reasons.

The freelancer’s guide to getting paid reminded me of my unpaid invoice. 

5 Tips for creating an inspiring workspace got me thinking of ways I can set up my own corner. Right now, there’s a stack of books, papers, a phone and a lamp. I’ll post a pic up soon, and you’ll see that decorating skills are absent in me

Over at Freelance Folder, Laura Spencer shed light on the uncomfortable facts about plagiarism. Thankfully, I’m nowhere near being a popular enough blogger to be plagiarized. I agree that blogging success has nothing to do with plagiarism but I do believe that it reduces the chances of having your writing stolen.

Sean has the second place in my list of bloggers who I read religiously. As in every post and every word written by them that I come across. And my list is only 4 people long. His post, An exclamation point is like a promise made me stop and think about my own use of the exclamation mark. Do you use it too often? 

If you’re struggling with blogging (and the best of us do) head over to Confident Writing where Joanna tells us about 10 Things to do when you lose your blogging voice. 

What have you been reading online lately?

It happens regularly. I come across an article that  I want to print- only to get discouraged by all the ads, background and images in the web page. Instead, I bookmark the article and promptly forget about it.

Sound Familiar? 

It drove me insane till I found the perfect solution. Courtesy: a quick firefox add-on search.

PrintWhatYouLike is an excellent service that lets you select only those parts of a web page that you want to print. Here are some options that have made my printing life easy.

• Remove images and backgrounds from a web page 
• Increases or decreases the font of the page according to preference
• Provides the option to save the selected text as a PDF or HTML file
• Has a firefox add-on! Though its in the experimental stages, so far, it’s working fine for me.
• Auto Formats the page for you – and lets you choose whatever text you want to print from that too!
• Lets you print directly from the web page.

What the free service doesn’t let you do is save clips. To save clips you’ll have to register and in the trial version you can only save 2 change sets and 6 clips.

To save more, you’ll have to upgrade to their Pro account which costs $5 per month. It also lets you save changes, snippets and tracks the money and paper you’ve saved by using PrintWhatYouLike. 

The Pro account is for you if you like to keep a copy of your saved stuff online and are trying to keep track of how green your paper trail is.

For an average user (like me) the free version works great. I haven’t signed up for the trial version because the add-on meets all my needs so far.

Verdict: I love it!

Do you use an alternate service? Is so, tell us about it! Or tell us about your experience with PrintWhatYouLike.

If you’re having trouble writing, take a good look at your word processor. Give it a mean look (like really mean), then step away from it.

Instead, pick up a paper and a pencil and discover the magic of writing like I did. MS Word got the boot by me about a week ago. It was being mean – the blinking cursor was laughing at me.

At the verge of giving up, I noticed the blank page at the back of a printed sheet on my desk. It didn’t look right. A paper just shouldn’t be blank, y’know?!

I picked it up and started doodling while I brooded over my word processor’s meanness. Soon I started writing. This time, I wasn’t chasing after my ideas with a paper and pen, I was capturing them! I kept writing all week.

Here are a few things I discovered during my journey to fill sheets of paper with my writing.

Writing by hand composes your thoughts

As you hand write the points, your brain gets the time to compose your thoughts into a coherent sentence. The chances of the perfect sentence forming grows tenfold because you’re able to form, reject and reform different sentences as you write.

A word processor doesn’t give us the time to do that. We type too fast and the longer we keep our finger poised over the keyboard thinking how to compose the next sentence, the more we feel like we’re stuck. Until we do get stuck!

Connect, highlight, refer, repeat.

When writing on paper arrows become my best friends. They tell which point they want to get connected to and which way they want to go from there.

Similarly, highlighters turn into my favourite people. After I’m done writing, I highlight the points I want to make a subheading out of, underline the things I want to elaborate in that subheading and use arrows for further extentions.

Then I pin it up on the wall in front of me and refer to it as I type in the word processor. Much easier than clicking between browser windows and losing my writing tempo.

Doodle!

Ah yes, the love of my life. Doodling is a habit everyone has. Unfortunately, you just can’t doodle in a word processor. You know how everyone says to write well you have to write everyday? I say to write well, heck to just write, you have to doodle along the way!

Your hand shouldn’t stop. Even if you’re just doodling your name. A moving hand means a moving thought process.

No Distractions

There is no email, gtalk, twitter or facebook – there is no internet, period. It’s just you, your pen and a piece of paper.

Something that would take ages to write between twitter and email (which you check everytime you got a little stuck) gets drafted in half an hour on paper. There’s no finicking over spellings and formatting, instead you’ll find yourself writing in short hand.

Has your writing been completely digitalized? How often do you use paper to write on and what difference do you feel between the two?

[Photo Credit: Prodigal unlimited13]

Technorati Tags: Freelancing, writer's block, Writing

It’s been a good month and as always, there were ups and down.

Triumph:

• I got  my first taste of affiliate sales this month. Felt good!
• I did website copywriting for a client who was willing to take a chance with me.

Trials:

• I’ve been so busy with work, I’ve barely had any time to study. Going to take on less work the next few weeks and concentrate on giving a couple of exams.
• An invoice of mine is stuck. I got paid half, but the rest is yet to come with a promise that it will be paid. Not quite sure what to do. Let’s see how it plays out this month.

News:

Not much news except that my 6 week trip back home got delayed. I will now be going home in late September. As fast as the time is going, I keep wishing it would go faster. 

In other news, my personal blog has reawakened with a new look and an old feel. If you’re interested in blog posts by me that all start with the word ‘I’ – head on over to Cuppa Life

P.S: Don’t kill me if you see a new look over at The Base again soon. I promise this will the absolute last for at least a year. The colors won’t change. Just the lay out.