One year, I set a really stern goal for pitching freelance stories-something like 20 a month. And danged if I didn’t see a huge upsurge in responses (positive ones!) to my queries.

That’s a pretty simple equation:

more queries = more work

After the magazine I edited folded about 18 months ago, I revisited my previous system, which had somehow faded ( Read more... )

After a year’s hiatus, this weekend I returned to the SCBWI annual conference. Due to a combination of absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder and the evidently frenetic (and fruitful) planning that went into the fortieth anniversary conference, I came away feeling not only refreshed and invigorated, not only newly inspired to continue a current ( Read more... )

Of course, a protagonist has to get in trouble. He (or she) has to bump up against Big Problems. She (or he) has to face Mind-Crushing Challenges. If the protagonist does not have these experiences, he-she-it is likely to give the reader (or viewer, in the case of my daughter, who chronically fast forwards through scenes of movies that even seem to ( Read more... )

My clever and crafty husband is building a gated-arbor-and-picket-fence intended not only to delight my eyes, but to keep the surprisingly-Tigger-like dog out of the vegetable beds. As he was connecting the archways to the pressure-treated posts, he discovered that the heavy rains had actually made an impact on the rocky, clay-y, so-called dirt in ( Read more... )

First, the Bad:

This morning I came across a freelancers' message board entry that nearly forced the coffee right out of my mouth. I paraphrase to protect the ignorant:

“Any tips for first-timers? After nearly a decade in a different field, I’ve decided to follow my bliss and write. All I need to do now is figure out how to make some money at it.”

Let ( Read more... )

I was just thinking about Diana Wynne Jones the other day. I think about her with some regularity, as she’s one of my favorite writers and a close personal friend (inside my head, anyway).

Sometimes I think about the anecdote I read, about the time she tried to serve her sons galoshes at tea-time, because she’d been working on a story and had absent ( Read more... )

I often enjoy enjoying the badness of something, when a truly horrible something comes upon me unexpectedly-like when I go to a movie I thought would actually be good, and it’s far, far from it. (For more on this, check out my homage to “The Wicker Man.”)

But when I’m working, I actually far prefer to enjoy enjoying the goodness of stuff. Like ( Read more... )

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Last night we went to the House of Blues to enjoy the song stylings of Orange County “lounge legend” Phil Shane-who did not disappoint. (Beatles! Neil Diamond! Tom Jones! And his original-and fabulous-composition “Love on the Internet!”)

It was just the kind of break from real life that I needed. (No taxes. No underemployment. No queries. Just ( Read more... )

Last week I was a guest speaker in a high school journalism class. Beginning and advanced journalism students in all levels of high school filled the jam, jam packed room (because I don’t wear my glasses when I make presentations [that way the audience is just a giant blur, and much less nerve-wracking], I didn’t even notice there were half-a-dozen ( Read more... )