A Month of Reading – Day Three, Query

 This is the third post in “A Month of Reading“

December third.  This being Monday, it was time to get back to business.  I had writerly business, homemaking business, school business, and monkey business to take care of today.

Once I got the kids to school, I tackled the writerly business first.  I wrote a blog post the other day that, when I read it back to myself, seemed more like a stand alone personal essay than anything else I’ve written lately, so I decided to try and sell it to a magazine.  I know one must pitch the story to the magazine before the magazine will buy it, but I don’t have editorial contacts at print magazines that cover this topic, so I did some Googling.

And then I chickened out.  Maybe I shouldn’t say that.  What I did was turn to the familiar:  online outlets.  Online magazines and websites that I admire and read, and whose staffers seem somehow more accessible to me than those of the print world, probably because I already work for people like that.  Still, I had to pitch, and I wanted to follow an acceptable format, so I looked it up.  I love the internet.  Even if it’s wrong, it gives me a place to start, at least.

This post –  An Example of a Successful Query Letter – gave me a real-world format to follow, and the first thing I did today was pitch the essay to an editor I know.  I happily checked this item off today’s to-do list.

Some other posts that I read were:

Rules For Success From Freelance Writers

The Query Letter Format

How To Write a Query Letter 

I joined reddit over the weekend to see if this would be a good social media site for both sharing my own posts and posts that I like, and also learning about new stuff to read.  It’s fairly stark in terms of design, and not necessarily intuitive to use, so I spent a few minutes reading up on how the site works.  I’ve known about it for a while, but it wasn’t until some writers in one of my Facebook groups have shared their fondness for it that I tried it, because look. It’s so…not pretty.  And I’m pretty sure I’m doing it wrong, because I’ve only gotten one point in 48 hours.

And because I had a ton of blog posts go live today, in which “a ton” means “four,” I spent some time reading my own stuff.  Sometimes I like to re-read it after it goes live, to make sure I wrote something I would read myself.  That’s the best way for me to tell that I am producing work that makes me proud.

How LASIK Is Just Like Childbirth on MomsLA.com.  “A human does not come out of a vagina, but the squeamishness factor is similarly high for me.”

Calabasas Can’t Hide New Restaurant Salt on CBSLA.com. “The Salt banana is still a mystery because it didn’t make it all the way around the table – instead, it was devoured along the way.”

Then there was the post I wrote last night that went live this morning, and there was an ill-fated post on my hyperlocal site that I had to take down because it needed a lot of editing, but I ran out of time and went to yoga, and then I came home and read airline websites because it’s time to fly my mother-in-law here to visit, and then it was time to get the kids.

And one more link tonight.  My friend Charlene gave me one of those friendly blogger awards.  I’ll address this in a future post, but you ought to check her out if you’re looking for new blogs to read, because Charlene is a great writer, and I helped her set up her blog.

Finally, just before I sat down to write this, I spent a few minutes reading through last year’s Christmas cards.  I finally pulled out our Christmas decorations, and the first box I always open is the one with Christmas cards, CD’s, books, and DVD’s.  It was nice to flip through the old cards, but also bittersweet.  In the pile were the last two Christmas cards signed by both my Nana and my Grampa together.  This year there will be simply, “Love, Nana.”