Skip to main content

A Writers' Conference

Jessica Burkhart. She's a tween author. That is she writes FOR tweens. She's not a tween herself. Although that's just about when she began her writing career. I attended one of her sessions at the Missouri Writers' Guild Conference this past weekend, and I walked away feeling like I had somehow missed my own wedding twenty five years ago. She's twenty-two (yes, 22) - my son's age. She's had hundreds of articles published and is in the middle of an eight-book deal. Wow. Check out her blog. After I got over my own sluggish debut into the writing world, I realized that she's been able to get this far because she actually sends out queries ALL the time. She doesn't sit back and hope for an answer from the one editor she sent one query to. She has mulitple queries out - according to her, 30 - at any one time. You can't get published if you don't get yourself into an editor's hands!
I know. Brilliant.
My favorite part of the conference was the two opportunities I had to make a pitch. The first one was to the editor of Listen Magazine. Although I didn't have an article idea that fit with their very specific mission (to offer teens healthy alternatives to drugs and alcohol), she was kind enough to give me a couple of ideas for magazines that might be interested in the ideas I had. The second opportunity to make a pitch? That was the highlight. Kate Angelella of Aladin Books (the children's imprint of Simon & Schuster) likes the premise of Antipodia. She wants me to send it to her when I've finished writing it. A real editor of a real publishing house. Wow. Yeah. I'm excited.

By the way, Antipodia is the middle grade novel I began as part of my writing course last year. The details? Well, I'll save that for another blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christ In You

My husband and I had dinner the other night with some dear friends. Our conversation didn't exactly meander to the topic of God. It was more like it burst into it with both guns blazing, although now, I can't stop my thoughts from meandering back to one simple phrase that our friend said: Christ in me . Several years ago I went through a season of reading the works of some Christian mystics, desert fathers and mothers as they are sometimes called because they separated themselves from their culture and lived in the desert to more effectively spend time with God without the distractions of city life. I read quite a bit of Jeanne Guyon. She obviously loved God deeply, and I learned a lot from her writings, but there was one phrase that she couldn't seem to emphasize enough, and it always bothered me - look within yourself to find God (sounds a little new-agey, doesn't it?) Honestly, the thought has been repulsive to me. It's so contrary to our modern Christian thoug...
5 comments
Read more

As A Child

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...
4 comments
Read more

Introverts Thrive! The Lies

Last week, I introduced my plan to work through the exercises in a little book called The Highly Sensitive Person's Companion by Ted Zeff  (if you missed it, you can read it here) . Before we jump into our first assignment, let's talk a little bit about introverts and "highly sensitive people." There seems to be some widespread misconceptions of what it means to be an introvert. People often define it as being shy or having social anxiety or worse, being self-absorbed. These descriptions simply aren't true. Extroverts can also be shy, have social anxiety, and can definitely be self-absorbed! Simply stated, introverts are internally stimulated, and they internalize external stimuli. Virtually everything is stimulating to an introvert! To bring it home, here are a few questions to which introverts/highly sensitive people would answer yes: * Do crowds exhaust you? * Do you tend to think before acting? * Is your body sensitive to alcohol and caffeine? * Does no...
Post a Comment
Read more