> - You said you are unable to show off your work. But how about showing block diagrams, technical summaries etc. (without violating NDA etc.)? Some clients prefer this to looking at code or an application.

Sometimes a past client will approve a snippet of your work. Choose something that clearly is out of date but representative of the project; put it into a suitable format and ask for permission. For instance, I have a short segment of an analyst report (in PDF) that I wrote back in 2004; it shows that I can write that sort of stuff, but the data is so stale that nobody would worry about it sharing proprietary information.