Monday, June 25, 2007

That Was A Close Call

Today I received an e-mail from an editor apologizing for not getting back to me for so long and saying that they'd just discussed my query recently. They thought they might be interested in the article in the future and were keeping me in mind but if I had a chance to publish it elsewhere, go for it.

I sat there in front of my computer monitor and thought, Hmmm. What do you suppose that's about?

Well, as it turned out, I'd queried these folks back in February regarding an article I was interested in doing on humor for kids. I had given a talk on that very subject but I had not yet written the article I was offering them. Editors don't exactly fall all over themselves to publish my nonfiction, and I thought it would be very foolhardy of me to use good time I could spend writing other things that wouldn't sell if I couldn't find someone who was at least interested before I got the ball rolling.

When I never heard from these people, I just took it as rejection. Rejection rolls off from me like water off a duck. I can barely tell anything's happened. In fact, when I never heard from these people the only thing I can recall thinking was, Well, Gaily, you called that one correctly. Good for you.

So when I saw who this e-mail was from, I had sort of an odd reaction. 1. You don't suppose they actually want this article, do you? 2. Crivens!* Now, I might have to write the thing!

As it turns out, this was rather a nice response. They may want it in the future, but I don't actually have to do anything about it any time soon.

*I'm reading The Wee Free Men.

5 comments:

Miriam said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Miriam said...

Gotta love those wee free men! I'll be looking to see if you comment more on the book later. My book discussion group read it a couple of years ago. We agreed that we enjoyed the first two thirds or so, but thought Pratchett took a strange turn with the last third. I liked the next one more. I still haven't read Wintersmith, though, which is the the third.

(By the way, I'm still not getting headlines from your feed. One of these days I hope to figure out why!)

Gail Gauthier said...

I checked with my computer guy. He didn't know what could be causing the problem.

Michele said...

Yay for you read the Wee Free Men ! (Though as I may have mentioned a few hundered times, A Hat Full of Sky is my favourite book of that series...

tanita✿davis said...

Heh. The minute I saw the word 'crivens,' I knew!

Lucky you to be reading Pratchett in the summertime. That's a doubly nice treat - having a funny book to read, and knowing that there's an 'eventually' at the end of the "you need to write that article" sentence.