This Week:
While watching the evening news with my husband, there was a segment on NASA’s mission to collide with a comet. I turned to my husband and said, “Oh, I’m interviewing one of the NASA experts on this subject next week”.
He gave me the strangest look, and replied, “How’d you get that?”
“I just asked.”
About a year after I started freelancing, I was getting pretty good at accepting rejections. Instead of letting it ruin my day, I would view a “No, thank you” response (as I prefer to call them), as part of the game. Usually, I would take the query, give it another good look, tweak it if needed, and send it out to someone else.
Since last week, we’ve traveled through four states, toured a quarry, stuffed ourselves as an ice cream factory and visited the boyhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband.
This week, I’m sharing snippets of some of the worst book proposals we’ve ever received. I hope you get a giggle from them like we did. Yes, these are real!
Letters will return next week.
More and more in my position as editor of an online newsmagazine I come across what I’m calling e-mail English and spelling. Grammar mistakes are rampant, words are mangled, and punctuation is non-existent. In a recent letter to the editor, I chastised the writer for his use of our language and his retort was, “who cares if it’s spelled right, you know what I mean.”
What would be helpful, I think, would be to provide some guidance about HOW to get Amazon’s attention, should we find such problems. Tackling that behemoth is daunting, especially, when one can spend a lot of time just figuring out how to e-mail them in a useful way.
A sign on the wall of my high school weight room said “Attitude is essential. A good one will get you far.” As a teenager who knew it all, I rolled my eyes and walked away. It turned out to be one of those lessons I had to learn the hard way.
In 2002, I got laid off from my fabulous online editing job thanks to the .com bust. I freaked out for awhile and, once reality set in, I decided to go solo.
The evenings are getting a bit chilly here in Bangor, Maine…and that’s our cue to head south and west in an attempt to extend our summer by a couple of months!
The RV is packed and we’re leaving early tomorrow morning. Yeehaw!!
