May I introduce myself?
My name is Iris Pilzer. I hail from Passau in Lower Bavaria (I only mention this because you can tell as soon as I start talking …).
My goal
My goal is very clear: helping other people. I have so much useful knowledge (and even more useless knowledge) in my head that I don’t want to keep for myself. This life is too short for me to waste away alone with my knowledge.
I want to help other people to get their own successful freelance business up and running.
And I want to inspire other people to finally sit down and work out and write down the idea for the story they may have been carrying around for years. It’s really hard, as I’ve been finding out over the last few years. The funny thing is: planning stories is really fun. Writing down stories is hard and tough work.
Motivation and discipline
Funny enough, I find it much easier to motivate others. To compensate for my lack of self-discipline, I decided to move phase 2 of my business forward: I first concentrate on other people and giving information. After that I can still live out my ego and write my own books. Sometime maybe …
And the rest?
In my life I have already done so many things (I am just incredibly curious):
- Bungee jumping from Bloukrans Bridge in South Africa
- playing so much Tetris that no one wants to play against me anymore (practice still makes perfect)
- Playing the guitar and the ukulele (and abusing the ears of my neighbors)
- Browsing the IKEA catalogue for the perfect inspiration (I love Scandinavian design!)
- Solving killer Sudokus with pencil, eraser and lots of cursing
- Cooking risotto until I can do it perfectly (and don’t want to eat it anymore)
But in the end, three hobbies stand out, which I always come back to:
Traveling. I can sit on a train for hours and look out the window. Just as I can walk for hours through a deserted landscape. On a journey, for me the trip itself is always the destination. Lying on the beach with a cocktail in hand is nice, but also somewhat boring.
Food. If I travel anywhere, it’s for food. I could never fill my trunk with food and then live on it for three weeks on a vacation. To me, that’s sacrilege. In the supermarket I’m always looking for ingredients I don’t know yet so that I can try them. And cooking shows? They are my jam!
Reading. My ultimate retreat. Since I could read, I’ve devoured every written word I could find. Nowadays these are usually dystopias, techno thrillers and reference books on everything that interests me at the moment.
My story
I always think there is not much to tell here; others always tell me that my story is totally interesting. You can decide for yourself:
Language has always fascinated me immensely. In the first few years of my professional career as a translator, I was mainly concerned with the superficial aspects of language: choice of words, sound, grammar, etc.
But at some point I wanted to go deeper. That’s why I first studied a master’s degree in technical communication. Funnily enough, typography, the subject that I liked least at the time, was later the biggest help when designing the insides and outsides of books.
One day I was lost my interest in my job with a large German company. I quit and decided to live on my savings for some time (as long as it would last). Almost at the same time I also started to learn everything I could find on storytelling, writing, and publishing.
When my money ran out, I had to make a decision: Go back to a “normal” job or work as a freelancer? I decided to work as a freelance translator and proofreader via Fiverr, and I’ve never looked back.
Now I have all this knowledge in my head about writing and freelancing and no one of my friends is interested in it (ungrateful twerks). But thank God for the Internet, which I can use to share my knowledge with the world.
Well, that was my story. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at iris@irispilzer.com. I’m happy about every email I get. Come on! I don’t bite … hard 🙂