Every now and then I get such a great question via email, I have to share it with the world. This recent one really made me reach back in my brain to think about how I handled it, and how I’ve seen other folks handle it, and eventually it became clear that this was one ripe for discussion.

So: Thank you to Kim for writing in to ask the following:

I would like to make a career for myself as a freelance writer, and I’ve read a lot of your advice about just how to do that… but the professional website part has me feeling at a bit of a loss. What, exactly, should appear on my professional website if I haven’t had any freelance writing gigs yet? I’m worried that it will wind up looking pretty sparse and unimpressive until I’ve successfully landed a few jobs (and potentially some nice feedback from them). Do you have any suggestions for making a website look presentable if the only writing “experience” I have to date is my personal blog?

Kim has discovered the Great Truth of most careers: You can’t get hired until you have experience, but you can’t get experience until you get hired. The good news here is that I’d argue writing is one of the few careers where this maxim can be… well, if not broken, certainly bent quite a bit. Let’s talk about how you can hang out your virtual shingle even when you don’t (yet!) have the resume to back it up.
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Once upon a time, a New York City literary agent dropped out of the sky and into my lap (well, okay; she sent me an email) and after much back and forth, we negotiated a contract for embarking upon a book project. Although I hadn’t been actively seeking an agent and/or a book deal, the timing seemed serendipitous, and I was thrilled.

I worked really hard on the book proposal. For months. She would suggest revisions, I would incorporate them, and we’d go ’round again. Finally, it was finished, and I was sure it could be an amazing book once we sold it and I wrote the rest of it.

And maybe it could’ve, but it never sold. Oh, we have a laundry list of reasons as to why the timing ended up being off and how the recession affected the publishing industry and competing titles emerged around the same time and blah blah blah… but the bottom line is that what happened to me is what happens most of the time: Most proposals don’t sell. Selling books is hard and somewhat demoralizing, and I knew all that before I started, which is a big part of why I hadn’t pursued that path. When my agent asked if I wanted to start another project, instead, I demurred. Despite everything I knew about the process, the rejection got to me, and I wasn’t eager to do it again.
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Hey, I’m back from our cruise! It was incredible. Amazing. Trip of a lifetime. I cannot thank my family enough for providing us with such a wonderful experience.

Of course, I got sick at the end of the trip, because I appear to be incapable of traveling anywhere without bringing back a nice little souvenir in the form of germs. And normally that would be fine—I could just go home and sleep it off for a few days—but in this case I ended up leaving the cruise and heading directly to an out-of-town work event, and today I’m speaking at a conference inbetween sneezes and blowing my nose. (Yes, I am well-armed with hand sanitizer. And apologies.)

The truth of the matter is that I don’t even really enjoy traveling all that much when I’m well. I’m a homebody; part of the reason freelance writing suits me is because I get to sit at my desk most of the time, secure in my own little bubble. Heh. But to travel while sick is a special kind of yuck.
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I desperately wanted to share this post before I left the country (I like how that sounds; maybe I fled! I sound so exotic and mysterious!), but I couldn’t, for reasons which will soon become clear.

But first, let me remind you what I do for a living. I write. I write for my blogs, and for other people’s and company’s blogs, and I do copywriting, and sometimes I write for magazines, and sometimes I do articles for various other outlets, and my point, here, is not to brag or anything, but just to say: I am a writer, I write for a living, and I do lots of different kinds of writing just about every day. Also—okay, maybe this is a brag—I happen to think I’m pretty darn good at what I do, most of the time.

I also, it should be noted, don’t believe in writer’s block. (I can always write something, it just may not be very good.) And yet, a few weeks ago, I took on what may well have been the hardest assignment of my career. And I really, really struggled with it.
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Ahhhh, Summer.

A time to relax. A time to vacation. A time to putter in the garden, swim in the pool, hang out with the kids, and catch up on everything.

Or not.

Every summer I have grand plans of how great it’s going to be, and most of the time it is pretty great, but the reality, too, is that I spend the summer months feeling like I should be working when I’m not, and wishing I was playing when I’m working. And thanks to the wonders of modern connectivity, I can even work on vacation. Why, just this weekend we went camping, and even though my (AT&T) phone had no signal, my (Verizon) MiFi was working just fine so that I could hook up my laptop and work.

I did very little work, but I felt really guilty, at least. Thank goodness.

Or, you know, not.
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