I checked out a book from my local library from 1987 about a person’s relationship with his or her agent. The book is so outdated that almost none of the advice is useable anymore, but it made for a funny read.

Some of the best advice:

Write your agent a nice, handwritten letter every 4 weeks to check on the progress of your manuscript (Aw, I’d love to send my agent a handwritten note. She’d laugh at me, though.)

Do not ever mail your manuscript out to more than one agent at a time (That would take forever now!)

Remind yourself that your agent will be taking 10 percent of your paycheck (Hmm…the industry norm now seems to be 15 percent)

Overall, the advice would have been great in ’87 but not relatable to 2007. It really shows how much things have changed.

As for new advice, the 120th anniversary of The Writer came out this month and it is chock full of good stuff. The amazing Sara Gruen has a lovely spread in the mag and there’s also a great exercise from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, a writing professor at my school.

Big thanks to Steph for providing me with excellent quotes for my deployment article! You rock, Steph! 🙂 More blogging to come…stay tuned…

I’m officially on spring break! Nope, I won’t be haunting the local beaches and clubs, instead, I have at least a dozen projects that require immediate attention. A research project on Oroonoko, a paper on Isle of Pines an essay for my writing class and a humanities essay are among the school projects. Now…the fun stuff….YA manuscript revisions are calling my name, magazine queries need to be sent and I was assigned a great article for Listen that I’m working on. Spring break is going to be busier than a regular week. Oh, joy! 🙂

Want to be quoted in Listen Magazine? I’m putting out a call for quotes. The question:

If you know anyone who has been deployed in the military, how did you deal with the deployment?

Email or post your answers here. Your quotes will be used in an article to help teens cope with family and friends in the military. I’ll need your quotes ASAP.

Thanks a bunch! 🙂

I was reading Kristen Nelson’s lovely blog when I stumbled upon Critique Circle. It looks quite interesting! Has anyone tried it before? I think I’ll get an account since it’s free. The only downside is that I always, always worry about posting my work on the Web and having it copied. Hmm… I’ll do a little more checking first, I guess.

So, I have over twenty magazine queries floating around and am anxiously awaiting responses. I’m in that stage where I have queries out at every magazine that I have an idea for, but now I have new queries ready for those mags but I can’t query until I get a response from the current letter. I have a couple of timely stories that deserve queries, but I have nowhere to send them as of now. The waiting game with magazines seems to be growing longer during these past couple of months. Personally, I think things pick up the most of the summer, oddly enough. Oh well, I’ll wait for e-mails and continue to look for new markets.

It seems magazines for tweens are taking over teen magazines. The tween mags are sweet and not as edgy as the older teen mags but the content seems to focus more on real-life instead of fluffy fashion.

On another note, I’m getting ready for NaNoEdMo and am looking ahead to Script Frenzy. There’s also a sort of NaNoWriMo for playwrights, too, but I can’t seem to find that link at the moment. Lots of options for everyone! I still haunt the NaNoWriMo forums every so often and enjoy learning what people are doing after November.

TGIF!

Welcome to the new blog for Jessica Burkhart! Starting Friday, February 23, I will begin blogging here and will no longer update Life of a Wannabe Writer though the archives will remain untouched.