[quote]Originally posted by Peach:
<strong> Editors are already overworked. Presented with a wrinkled sheaf of typo-riddled tangled text complete with dangling modifiers, half-deleted sentences, and inventive punctuation, they tend to emit hissing noises like a startled kitten and then scratch sand all over it with their hind paws before sending it back.
--Delia</strong><hr></blockquote>
Totally agreed. I have not done any editing myself, at least for a "real" publication, but from various friends, I know some of the queries and submissions they get are awful.
Just a hint for those, like yours truly, who aspire to write. First, don't tell the editor your entire life story, second, do try to stay on topic, and lastly, most people will not be impressed by your vast publication history with "Rent-A-Chicken Magazine" (I kid you not there is apparently such a thing, a TA in a creative writing class I took was on the staff of the school's lit. mag. and had us read some of the submissions once. Someone listed said magazine as somewhere they had published before. Even we, novices that we were, were not impressed). On the other hand starting small is good.
More info than you wanted, and perhaps enough to get this thread locked (horrors), but I'm considering freelancing on a semi-casual basis--as a "real" writer who spoke to my class said, "The key to making a good living as a freelance writer is to have a significant other with a significant income". Still something to do to make money on the side, and keep up the writing skills. Anyway, the situation with getting published in a professional magazine, even a small niche related one, is the same as in the job market: You need experience (or clips to prove that you can in fact produce a decent article) to get hired (published), but in order to get experience (or clips) you need to get someone to hire you (publish you). Aargh! Why didn't I just decide to become a plumber?!
Some days I really can't answer that.
I can attest to, to how much work goes into producing something decent. For a recent class we had to produce a newsletter, down to making an actual printed mock-up of what it would look like. It's great to see something you had a hand in making come to fruition, but it's hard work.Between figuring out how many articles you need, and what you'd like articles on, and how long the articles are going to be, and figuring out the layout, and dealing with the various glitches in the printing, --sorry, we can't do that font, or you say you didn't want pea/barf green, too bad, guess you should have given us a pantone number, etc--, and getting everything proofread and given a final layout so that it can get to the printer on time, it's insane. This was with three people working on four pages, and articles written only by us--the work would have increased exponentially I'm sure if we had to bug people on getting their articles in on time, or had to deal with creative differences and all that craziness.
So, yeah I appreciate what they have to do to get this baby out, and for what they have to go through, in addition to their "real" jobs, I think they do a good job. End of yet another rant. <img src="graemlins/blah.gif" border="0" alt="[Blah]" />
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