Make sure your submission is dressed for success.
Once glance at the manuscript told me the author was at best a hobbyist—not serious about the craft of professional writing.
All that without reading one word of his novel.
Even if the story were great, any literary agent or acquisitions editor would begin an evaluation having already counted several strikes against it.
A … Continue reading
Mute the TV and start scribbling.
For weeks I’d wondered how to fill a key need for my magazine’s next two issues. The official with whom I was working had a history of coming up short on content.
Rather than depend on him to suddenly generate material, I needed to give him specific requests. But my time to draft those assignments kept … Continue reading
You can make one any day.
The turn of the calendar offers a good opportunity to begin things anew. But I appreciate that we aren’t restricted in when we can turn over a new leaf.
Sometimes changes are forced upon us. This fall, my page layout program stopped working with my computer’s classic operating system.
I had no choice, so I … Continue reading