Parisian Phoenix Publishing

I periodically submit writing articles to Hippocampus Magazine. I often draft them when I have an idea and send them to the editor who makes a little stock pile in her electronic filing cabinet. Earlier this week, they published another of my essays: Now What? How Patience & Building Relationships Can Pay Off for CNF Writers. And it was a lot of fun for me to read because I had forgotten about it. An excerpt:

I started writing for newspapers when I was in high school. I was a stringer for the Newark Star-Ledger in college. In the aughts, I was pitching my novel to New York agents. And in between every job, I was freelancing for the Morning Call, a daily newspaper covering Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.

Writing is as much about waiting as it is about words.

Whether you are pitching an article or a book, or merely waiting for the editor to return your draft, or worse — waiting for the item to run so you can get paid — writers wait.

But how do you know when to wait and when to act? How long should you wait?

The answers depend on the level of communication you have with the entity, the type of relationship you have and how that entity fits into your goals as a whole.

Read more about the value of networking and cultivating relationships in my Hippocampus piece here.