Sick of nick picky editors tearing your work apart?

Find yourself complaining to anyone who’ll listen about how miserable freelancing has become?

Shut up and innovate.

That wake up call is brought to you courtesy of Tac Anderson, a tech industry source of mine who attacked the nation’s current whiny zeitgeist in an especially impassioned manifesto a couple days ago.

The economy, the layoffs, the stock market – what’s happening is out of any one person’s power to control, and the only thing you can do about it is act, Anderson writes. Look at what you do from a different perspective. Try something new. Don’t have money? Figure out something innovative that doesn’t cost anything.

What does this have to do with freelancers?

Lots. Freelancers are getting hit by a double whammy of a sucky economy and an industry that’s going through radical changes the likes of which most writers have never seen. So you can bang your head against the wall pitching to the same shrinking print magazine market. Or you can think outside the printed page for new markets, new opportunities and new ways of conducting your writing business. The need for good writing isn’t going away – people with good communications skills will always be sought after. But the medium, the format and the styles are changing. So adapt with the times.

Back to Tac Anderson. This week he’s following his own advice and leaving a job he’s held for the past two years heading up social media marketing for HP’s Laserjet division in Boise, Idaho, for a new gig with PR giant Waggener Edstrom’s Studio D division in Seattle. Chalk one up for innovation.