Archive for July, 2011

One good turn…

I arrived at the Backspace Writers Conference in May late for the best part. I had volunteered to be a parent advocate at a special ed meeting, the meeting had gone poorly due to bad behavior by school administrators, and I walked into the query-critique session just as it was ending. The critiques are why I pay for the excellent Backspace meetings: You and 14 other writers in your genre (mine’s crime) have your query and first two manuscript pages read and reviewed—sometimes shredded—by two agents. So I’d missed half what I’d paid for.

I apologized to both agents. They took my query and said they’d look at it. I figured that was the end of it, and headed into one of the panel discussions on something like eBook rights, glum after the bad school meeting and my missed opportunity. Yesterday, one of those agents—I won’t name her because I don’t have permission—emailed and said she found my crumpled query in the bottom of her bag. She remembered my sad tale and offered to send me a critique, which she did.

This is not the big news story of me getting an agent. It’s about an act of kindness, the keeping of a promise. There are good people in the making words business. And sometimes, a good deed, or attempted one, begets another.

Almost done

I teach the fourth and fifth graders at Colonial School some of journalism’s old traditions, not because they’ll be useful someday. They won’t. After all, these kids are publishing their school paper as a news blog, using WordPress. It’s more for the fun of it, and sharing the history, before that history is forgotten.

One thing I make them do is put -30- at the end of a story. This is the old code once used on newspaper copy to indicate a story is finished. As it turns out, it actually helps in my work with the Colonial kids because they file using Google Apps, and if they write the story at home, it’s often the only way I know they’re done. Many of them don’t have email yet.

So I’ve invited them to write stories over the summer. They get a pizza party if they do. And one of my reporters, Francesca, is filing from Italy, on the disappearing beaches. When I checked the story yesterday, I found this at the end:

-29- (almost done)

Now that’s adapting an old code to a new use. I wished I’d thought of that when I was late for deadline in my newspaper days.

-30-