This “salon” is intended as a place where you will find articles by impressive writers willing sharing their thoughts on the process, their insights on craft, and their ideas on other writers. Oh, and their unvarnished experiences about making a living, being edited, facing rejection, going out on all kinds of limbs. Each post will have a comment area to encourage conversation and to ellicit your thoughts as well, so, please post away!

Literary agent Jill Kneerim put together an eight-point checklist for prospective authors looking for an agent. Point Number 1: If you have more than one idea or book you are working on, pick ONE of them to lead off with, and don’t mention the others for a while. (The woods are full of amateurs who have drawers full of unpublished manuscripts.).

If you’re thinking about writing books, it’s helpful to know some of the basics about how much money to expect, how advances work, and when—if ever—you’ll collect royalties. There’s much confusion out there, especially since all we generally read in the press is that Sarah Palin got $5 million for her book, Barack Obama $500,000 for his.

I did some quick research, added to it what I know from my own experiences both as an author and editor, and then ran this summary by a few agents and editors to make sure it’s sound.

Nearly every writing book on my shelf suggests the same somewhat mysterious daily practice. It has many names: “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; “first thoughts” in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones; and “early morning writing” in Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers, prefers the somewhat ungainly but increasingly popular “freewriting.”

I find that freewriting is a useful channel for my ever-churning, over-active brain. It’s efficient therapy—cheap and fast.

An old deodorant commercial once proclaimed, ‘If you’re not a little nervous, you’re really not alive.’

Pretty sage advice, even though the only thing at stake was staying dry and odor-free. But there is something to be said for accepting—and learning to navigate—the minor turbulences of life. I’m talking here about common, everyday anxiety. The jitters. Butterflies. This is particularly true for writers, whose very feelings are the raw materials of their craft.

Then there are the more virulent writer’s anxieties, shared by few in other lines of work: Your agent hasn’t returned your phone calls. You are three weeks past deadline. You have Act Two problems.

A laid-off writer/editor contemplates the challenges of a freelance career

The day I walked out of the newsroom—July 29, 2008—I felt like the happiest unemployed man in America. For nineteen years, I had put out the Sunday Travel section at the Sun-Sentinal in Fort Lauderdale, filling it with stories from journeys around the world (mine and freelancers’), and columns reflecting on—and often poking fun at—the changing state of that world. It was, as I wrote in the book that collected some of those pieces, “a charmed, unheralded life.”

I don’t remember the year, or the name of the artist, or even whether the exhibit contained paintings or sculpture, but I’ll never forget the name of the show years ago at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum: “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” I immediately copied down the words and later pasted them on my bulletin board. There they still live.

“Total risk, freedom, discipline” has become my mantra. Those four words say more about my daily life as a writer than the empty term “process” can begin to suggest.