An odd sort of day

It's been a funny sort of day. My insomnia returned with a vengeance at 2am and I crept downstairs to get a glass of water and entertain myself for a while on the PC. The first thing I did was look on the website of a well-known national newspaper to see if it had published my feature. It had and I was very excited. Then I remembered it was 2am and everyone else was asleep so I had no one to share the moment with.

I returned to bed a couple of hours later, spent another hour trying to fall asleep again and eventually got up just as my beloved P was heading to work. I spent some time copywriting blurb for my lovely graphic designer as we are doing a joint pitch for a coveted contract. The publisher rang to confirm they are offering me a book to edit. That's my next 17 days accounted for then... Then it was time to knuckle down and fill in my disability forms for the government.

Towards the end of the afternoon I got another call, this time from the company I was ghostwriting for last week. This time, they are offering me the job of editing a handbook, including commissioning many of the articles for it. I have tentatively said yes, subject to discussions.

Then the icing on the cake - the national newspaper emailed me to say the company I'd had a moan about in print wanted to talk to me. Yikes! I wondered if I might be laying myself open to a lawsuit. Or conversely a bunch of freebies... I bit the bullet and mailed back. No response yet, but I'm still alive... and I had fanmail too.

Life is good. Bring it on.

Commissioning editors - what do they want?

Here's a question to vex the minds of writers... what do commissioning editors look for when hiring freelances?

I got involved in a rather heated online debate with a bunch of fellow hacks earlier in the week. What started off as a simple discussion on whether a journalist needs to have good written English or not spilled over into a wider and intense argument.

I commission writers myself, as a part-time, freelance contributing editor for a quarterly niche magazine. I know what I want - a writer who knows the magazine well, who has great ideas to pitch to me, can put a story together coherently and deliver their copy on time. Controversially, I pointed out that I also expect any writer I commission to have a reasonably good grasp of written English - I want them to spell properly, know their grammar and use punctuation correctly.

For daring to say this, I was shot down in flames and told I am deluded and not living in the real world. Apparently, all journalists need to be able to do is get the story out. Actually, I broadly would not disagree with that - with a proviso. That's fine and dandy if the journalist is supplying copy to a newspaper that has desk editors and an army of subs to restructure the writing and clean up all the typos and poor grammar.

For magazines on a tight budget, it's a very different matter. The one I work for is run on a shoestring. I don't get paid vast amounts for the copy I write for it and I get paid very little for subbing and proofing the laid-out pages. For me, this means that if I have a choice between commissioning a writer who can write well and supply me with copy that doesn't need vast amounts of work at the production end and a writer who writes well but needs a lot of time spent on delivered copy, I know who I'm going to choose. Every time, it will be the writer who is the all-rounder (or as near to as possible). The magazine simply can't afford to pay me hours to rewrite thousands upon thousands of words of hot stories that are badly structured and a copy-editor's nightmare. The writers I commission not only get a brief, they also get a copy of our house style guide and are asked to adhere to it. Those that play by our rules are much more likely to get a second shot on our pages.

So, am I deluded? I'd rather think I was being practical. When money is at stake and you have to be efficient with it, the writers who get recommissioned are the ones who will save you valuable pennies at production stage. Another journalist involved the above-mentioned debate operates in the same way.

Perhaps if I was a section editor at the Guardian, my priorities would be different. I'd be looking for writers who can deliver news, now, and get the subs to work their magic on the pedantic details. Newspapers run on a vastly different timescale to small irregular magazines and have oodles more funds to play with. Here, the need is to publish a freelance's copy quickly before anyone else does. As long as they deliver to deadline, the subs have time to bring that copy up to scratch.

Journalism comes in all shapes and sizes these days. It's not all about news. There are hundreds of magazines - weeklies, monthlies, quarterly - that operate very differently to the daily press. And there are the websites too, which have their own way of publishing. What suits one commissioning editor will not necessarily suit another as it depends what publication they work for.

I believe the hacks I was arguing with were looking at the debate very one-sidedly.

To anyone breaking into freelance writing, sending in a poorly written pitch full of typos will give a commissioning editor the first pointer as to how good your language skills are. If the ed is on a tight budget, that will make a huge difference as to whether you ever get rehired.

Still no end in sight

I am SICK of hedge funds! I've worked eight hours solid today and I still have masses to do. The commissioning editor finally e-mailed me today with the missing style guide for the references section. I have successfully contracted this out to a trainee editor (which will save me several hours). I explained to the commissioning editor that the work was going to take even longer than expected - she'll be lucky to receive it by Tuesday lunchtime, at this rate. I have still have 30-odd pages of MS to edit, plus all the outstanding graphs, tables and illustrations. And, of course, I'll need to check over the edited references when they come back to me, and go through all my flagged-up queries and prepare an author query sheet.

I think I'll be cracking open a bottle of Moet when I finally sign off this project.

I had masses of interruptions today - my e-mail inbox was overflowing, for starters. Like many people, when that little symbol flashes in my system tray, I have to go look at what's coming in. If I don't, the symbol distracts me and disturbs my concentration. And besides, I don't want to miss anything really important, like the arrival of a missing style guide.

E-mail arrived from my graphic designer - the first "final" draft of the ad is ready for our client. I had a look at the PDF, approved it and rang him back so he could send it to the client. We had a quick chat about this and that, then rang off so we could both get on with work.

A chavvy guy rang me to ask about my services. It turned out he was writing his autobiography and wanted me to edit it. I gently explained that he needed to find an agent in order to secure a publisher - it would be unethical of me to take up to £2,000 off him to edit his book when he has no publishing deal. And besides, the publisher normally bears the cost of editing and proofreading. I told him how to find an agent and hung up.

Someone else offered me a free book on feature writing, which I accepted. The proviso is I have to write a review of it for some publication or other. Unpaid, no doubt. No problem, I'm happy to do that. I just hope the book is good.

Now I'm sitting here nattering with my beloved P, sipping a chilled sherry and trying to unwind for the weekend.

I'm going to try very hard not to think about work over the weekend, as the onslaught will resume at 8am on Monday morning...

TFINF!

Thank feck it's nearly Friday! I am worn out. I've had my head in hedge funds all day and it's not a pleasant place to be. I have learned far more than is polite or advisable about share equalisation methods, for one thing. Somehow, I managed to edit 50 pages in 8 hours - trust me, that was fast, given the quality of the text. I took lots of mini breaks to read e-mails as they came in and to surf my favourite business networking forum. I'm now about 2/3rds of the way through the text, so with any luck I'll be finished by the end of Monday. I had no reply yesterday to my e-mail to the commissioning editor - I rang her this morning, only to get her voicemail. Gah! I left her a lengthy message and urged her to call me back. Guess what? I've heard nowt... such is the editor's lot. I'll have to chase her again tomorrow, when I could be getting on with actually editing.

At 6pm, I downed tools (keyboard, mouse, dictionaries) when the beloved P came home. He poured aperitifs for us and we caught up on each other's news (mine being very dull). At 7pm, I slunk off to unwind with a dose of EastEnders. Then I grilled steaks and poured wine.

My other soap passion, of course, is The Archers. One of these days, I'll bore you all with my special interpretation of the World of Umbrage...

Now? It's nearly time to crash with a good book... (currently re-reading HP and the Goblet of Fire).

Editorship applied for...

Purely by chance, while surfing the net at the weekend, I came across a dream job. Now being a freelance, working for an employer is not really part of the game plan. But this was too good an opportunity to miss - it's only part-time for a quarterly magazine so I could continue to freelance the rest of the time while devoting a few days per month to being editor of what is possibly the most prestigious publication in its field.

I have long had an interest in fetish matters and I have the journalistic experience to back me up. So, after discussing it with the beloved P at the weekend, this morning I wrote my application and e-mailed it, along with my CV, to the MD.

I await a response with interest.

I'm certain to be offered an interview - there cannot be many fully experienced journalists and editors who are also fetishists. I don't expect the competition to be extensive. The job was not, as far as I can tell, very widely advertised at all. I wonder how many people they will invite in for a chat? I know my CV is excellent and I have the contacts "in the field" to be able to commission good photographers and writers.

I'm on tenterhooks now, even though it may be a few weeks before I hear anything at all... I'll keep you all posted. In the meantime, please keep your fingers crossed for me.