Wordsmith Lane

The thank you post

Good Morning lovely wordsmiths, and welcome to another week of navigating the freelance writing road that is wordsmith lane.

I hope and trust that you have all had a marvellous weekend, high on the support that came out in full force for me when I was a little down last week. I thank each and every one of you for your feedback, but to those who wrote in with positive ‘hold your chin up high’ comments, I am especially indebted.

You see, over the last three months or so, I’ve been meaning to write this feature on-spec for this publication that I really want to write for. Apart from the Madison article, this was the only pitch/feature on the boil for me, as I have been having a very tough time productivity-wise and have been extremely low on energy. I have not had any success writing because I have not been doing any pitching. And this particular article, which I really wanted to get out, just wasn’t being written.

Ofcourse, being exhausted did not help. Neither did my shameless sooking (which to me at least, was more venting). And then after a few comments and a nasty email, I was like ‘Woooaaahhh’ and just had to take a step back and re-evaluate everything. Especially because I freaked out and thought perhaps the majority of my readers felt this way about the blog but just did not tell me, and I was just sitting there yap, yap, yapping away to disinterested people who were gaining nothing from my lessons except the suspicion that I am a stuck-up writing snob of sorts.

So basically, that post had to come out, if only to assess if the blogging thing was worth your time and mine. And I got many lovely responses that just put my mood on a level it has not been in in months. NO KIDDING. And it’s funny, because said mood perhaps coincided with the fact that I had very little time with my laptop over this weekend, which is not only unusual but also something I try to avoid.

Miraculously, said reduced time and the beautiful wordsmithlane reader comments zapped at something in me on Saturday, and post-brunch at Kazbah’s in Balmain with gorgeous SBS jouno Yalda Hakim, I came home and wrote. For two hours straight. Two and a half thousand words to be precise. And I finished my big on-spec article, for the big magazine that I don’t want to name in case I jinx it, the very same article that I had been struggling to write for months on end.

So thanks for being great enough to bring some wordsmith mojo back. And despite all your overwhelming support for the blog, there are some things I juust need to get out there while I can:

• I am re-evaluating the need for beauty posts here on Wordsmith Lane. I mean, so many of you are these amazing beauty bloggers, so I don’t really need to keep going with the beauty content in full-force. Occasionally, I will post beauty bits and pieces in the Life Snapshots section, especially when there’s another Benefit or Burt’s Bees or Trilogy product that I need to harp on about. That said, I will be doing some beauty writing for Trespass magazine, so there will be features from those post republished on the blog, in the Writing Portfolio section.
• I don’t know if I can handle blogging everyday anymore. I don’t want to deliberately force myself to post quantitive posts at the expense of quality, so I ask you to place me in your google reader, or to subscribe to my feed, so that you can still continue to receive your wordsmith lessons and my usual rants and ravings even if you have no idea about my posting schedule (which at this point in time, does not exist).
• And even though I won’t be doing beauty stories per se, I’ll still be pursuing my need for a life of style, smarts and savoir-faire as per usual, as that is more in line with my personal ‘Sarah Voice’ than anything else that is decidedly non-wordsmith. And I am still going to try and post videos, because I had so much fun doing my Brows with benefit video.

And with all of that, I am over and out. Thanks so much again everyone, I hope you all have an extremely productive wordsmith week x