Monthly Archives: November 2019

New Jersey bill attacks freelancers

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged freelancing New Jersey regulation on by

A bill in the New Jersey legislature could mean trouble for freelance writers. It bans freelance contract work that doesn’t meet all of the following requirements:

a. The individual has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the service, both under the individual’s contract of service and in fact; and

b. The individual’s service is either outside the usual course of the business for which that service is performed; and

c. The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

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How writers should deal with Internet bullying

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged Internet writing on by

There’s an old Internet saying: “Don’t feed the trolls.” It’s still excellent advice. When people communicate with you only to get you upset, the best answer is usually no answer.

Some authors have been subjected to online harassment by cultural segregationists. Their crime is to write something which is not permitted to their race or ethnic group. A bunch of racists piled on Amélie Wen Zhao for the offense of depicting a fantasy world in which slavery isn’t limited to people with dark skins. (There’s a real-world counterpart: China, which is where Zhao comes from.) Some of these bigots said that people with yellow skins shouldn’t write about slavery at all. They temporarily intimidated her into withdrawing her book from publication.
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