The Copywriter Underground

The human brain can track up to four complex thoughts simultaneously, and yet — just before lunchtime today — I counted the open windows on my new 17″ laptop.
Six OpenOffice windows (five text, one spreadsheet), four Live Writer windows (my blog editor), three draft e-mails, a still warm-to-the-touch Google Talk window, and yes — two […]

I’m a learn-it-yourself kind of guy, which means I learn by doing. As a result, it’s often hard for me to teach; instinctive learners like myself don’t always understand the progressions used by other types of learners.
By contrast, Michel Fortin’s always excelled at breaking things down for his readers, and his current post hits home: […]

I haven’t forgotten you, my little Undergrounders. Sure, I haven’t posted anything useful lately, but one look at my to-do list would suggest why.
The snow is piling up by the metric ton, the snowblower is feigning death, the clients are calling, and yes — the old desktop PC has been dead in the water and […]

I hadn’t visited Buzzwhack.com in a while — a serious sin of omission for any wildly hip, totally “with it” dude like myself.
If you haven’t visited, Buzzwhack catalogs the pretentious new buzzphrases and words invented to impress the less-connected among us. It’s big fun, and a great way to spend time that you might otherwise […]

It’s been an intense week; I wrote a lot of words and also shipped my podcast, and despite some issues with the hardware, the final result was pretty nice. Nicer, in fact, than the client expected.
Love to hear that.
So now I’m a podcaster. Too.
Sorta.
The best part about writing for a living is that the […]

Done any free work lately? Seen your work used in multiple places — without ever receiving a dime?
The never-demur Harlan Ellison — a successful, outspoken and abrasive writer — tells it like it is in this short interview. Great stuff — I would have laughed a lot more if so much of it hadn’t been […]

Moving is stressful. It’s a lot of backbreaking work (and I noticed none of you offered to help).
 The Writer’s Office doesn’t look like this. So what does it look like?
The good news? A new home office space is in my future. (New. That’s an exciting word).
Because I started down copywriting’s path when most copy was […]

It’s not exactly “Copywriters Gone Wild,” but for the next two weeks, this copywriter will be blogging from a remote camp on East Grand Lake, Maine.

Copywriters boil away all that isn’t essential, leaving behind the essence of a product. Which is why felt strangely at home when I stumbled across a creative writing site dedicated to telling a story in a single sentence. (Consider One Sentence the forerunner of twitter, but with meaning.)

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. […]

Before PCs, writers used typewriters, and before that, they used pen and paper.
Naturally, being a largely superstitious, wholly contentious lot, battles erupted over what pen worked best, and why. Later, the word processor wars broke out, and back when there was actually a difference between products, writers in text-based online bulletin boards fought over them […]