Editors sure are funny

(And when I was an editor I thought the same thing about freelancers.) I've never been very good at predicting which proposals my editors will like. The ideas I think are really neat, or maybe even Important, they tend to think are weird or boring or overly arcane. The ones I think are just okay, or cute throwaways, they latch onto. So of my last four pitches, two from conscientious trolling of the internet for new ideas, one from a random conversation at a picnic, one based on headaches I was having with a new cell phone, which do you think got picked up? Better yet, when I pointed out to an editor that the reason he gave for shooting down one of the other proposals wasn't accurate, he decided he still didn't like it. Of course, I'm thrilled to be doing the pieces that editors did like, and I'm pretty sure I'll find something eventually for the holdout, or he'll find something for me.

The most useful lesson to come out of this latest round of proposals: the value of gentle persistence. I didn't hear anything about one of the "throwaway" proposals for about a month, and figured that it had met a deserved end in the editor's bit bucket. Turned out he'd been busy (imagine that!), the article had seemed to conflict with another one in the publication's pipeline, and so the proposal had slipped his mind until I brought it up again. Now all I have to do is the reporting and writing...