Pencil Shavings

The Tools Of The Trade

(Written June 23, 2006)

If you are scratching your head you may want to read here first.

Every profession has tools that go with it. Butchers have knives, ferriers have anvils, and seamstresses have needles and pins. And, writers have paper, pens and computers. It is the latter that is, once again, being problematic for me. Sure I can write and write and write in notebooks. Hell I could compose in chalk on the sidewalk, but unless I can transcribe that writing into a form for submission I may as well write my words in sand as far as furthering my career goes.

My computer is once again on the verge of death. I need to get it some urgent care. A non-writing friend of mine said, “well there are those darling antiques, pens and paper.”

Ha
Ha
Ha

The fact is that no one, absolutely no one, accepts hand written manuscripts anymore. In fact very few publishers accept typewritten manuscripts, unless you can provide a soft copy on disk.

Losing your computer, especially when you are trying to write an article every week for submission, is a huge disability in the writing world. Although losing my computer will probably save me some money in online shopping.

News, Fiction and Fictional News

I have always been cautious about what I take for facts when reading things online, but generally if it reads like a news article it does tend to have more credibility than, say (ahem), a blog.

A while back I was considered for, and considering, writing some web content. The client asked for a customer testimonial for their website, written as a “news” article, stating how the companies product made her life easier, happier, and generally stress free. AND it was supposed to be completely made up.

What the client wanted was a piece of fiction dressed up as fact. I know that a writer happily fulfilled the clients desires, but that writer wasn't me. Even if I had used a pen name I wouldn't have been comfortable doing that. I am happy to write fiction, and market it as fiction. I am happy to write magazine articles and web content and market it as such, but I am not happy erasing the line between the two.

I am not happy deceiving people. I missed out on a paying writing gig, but I doubt I would felt happy about that piece of writing no matter how much I was paid for it.

Sold!

Well that was nice. I sold another article, and I didn't really have to work at it. Well I did have to work at it months and months ago. It was a Christmas article that wrote last October, and it was rejected by the editor I had written it for. Then this opportunity came up for a similar article.

I did a quick edit (all told about 15 minutes of work – including re-reading it to make sure I was remembering the article correctly) then I sent it off and it was bought and paid for almost immediately.

And the nice thing was that it didn't take much time away from the editing that I am doing on my two short stories that I want to submit to competition.

Which is what I should really be getting back to!

Timeline Of A Freelance Job

I sold an article last night.  It wasn't for rent money, more like coffee money, but money is money.  After I sold it I remembered that it was a little over a year ago that I pitched my first article and had it accepted.  At the time I wrote a blog about it, and I am posting it here, with a little editing.  Who knows maybe one of you can benefit from my first effort.

Firstly, let me say, that I read, A Lot!  I think that you have to have a great interest in reading if you are going to be able to write anything of worth.

I receive many magazines by subscription.  One of the magazines I get is a hobbyist magazine.  While reading it I realized that they didn’t have any articles aimed toward new hobbyists, only for people who had a lot of experience in this hobby.

I knew then that I had my hook.  A professional writing friend once told me that when you send a query you need to sell the editor on how accepting your article will benefit the magazine.  So I did my pitch talking about why I thought that articles geared toward novices, written in non-technical terms would benefit the magazine.  I sent off the email on Friday.

On Monday I received a very enthusiastic reply.  We emailed back and forth until Wednesday when he had decided that the article I wanted to write really needed to be a series.

So I was off and writing.  I was scared.  I wrote anyway.  My husband was lukewarm about the project, but I wrote anyway.  My kids interrupted me constantly, but I wrote anyway.

I sent off the first article to my writing friend to review, before I sent it to the editor.  Funny thing was that I was more afraid of what my friend would say about it than I was about the editor might say.  She assured me that it was great.  So I sent it off with the picture I had a photographer friend take for me, and began polishing up the final two articles.

The editor was very pleased with my novice effort and positioned it as the the first story in the magazine.  I was thrilled and bought a copy for my mother...  doesn't everyone do that?