Natalia M. Sylvester

Not that I HAVE a young apprentice, but if I did, this is the advice I’d give her (while speaking like a master Jedi).

I didn’t learn this lesson in freelancing as early as I probably should have. The first article I ever sold was a classic example of beginner’s luck. I wrote an essay, emailed it to the editor and took a nap (these were my college days, after all). By the time I woke up the editor had responded.

So, why call it beginner’s luck? For one, I spelled the editor’s name wrong in my initial email. Not only was I lucky that she happened to be at her desk to read my misspelled email right as I sent it, or that she wasn’t so swamped with other submissions that she read mine right away, but she was also kind enough to overlook my blunder. In her response, she misspelled my name (point taken) before telling me she wanted to buy the article.

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I thought long and hard about whether or not I should make my first post this nice little welcome/intro/about me post. Then I thought, “No, that’s why I spent the last hour editing and tweaking the ‘about me’ section,” so better to dive right into what’s going on today in my writing life.

I have my first meeting today with a new writer’s group that I was invited to join when I attended The Writer’s Institute in May. It’s a newly-formed group, with four fiction writers total, all of whom have joined other groups in the past that later fizzled out. I’m trying to figure out why this is such a common occurrence with writer’s groups and hoping that it won’t happen again. The last workshop I joined was full of excellent writers, but we just couldn’t get our schedules to coincide. The one before that had a couple of members who didn’t take (constructive) criticism very well. Still another one had writers who just weren’t writing; after a few meetings, they’d run out of work to submit.

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