DeadpanAnn, Writer Extraordinaire

Several months ago, I met a lady from Illinois who had just started her own marketing company and publishes a health magazine. She had worked on this same magazine while living in Illinois, but was starting a similar one that would focus on the medical resources in South Mississippi. As soon as she mentioned that she was publishing a magazine, I told her I would be happy to help her if she ever needed a writer. A week later she brought me copies of the Illinois version of the magazine, and told me to review them and get back with her if I was seriously interested in writing. Next thing I knew, I was officially her staff writer, and I started getting nervous. She still hadn't seen anything I'd written, and it's been a while since I've written anything other than this blog, which has made me an extremely lazy writer. I find myself having to really think about things that used to come easily. Yesterday I met with her to get some stuff together for the first issue, and I feel much better about it. I started feeling normal again after about half an hour of working, and realized that it's not going to take long to get my groove back. Now I'm getting PUMPED!

I'm not making any money for this at the moment, but there's the potential for that later. My hope is that it will open the door for more freelance writing opportunities-- ones that pay. The worst case scenario is that I don't make a dime at this but get to freshen up my writing skills. That alone will make it worthwhile. It deeply disturbs me to think that I could "forget" how to do the one thing I've always taken pride in being good at, and that's what I've felt has been happening over the last few years as I've read page after page of mind-numbingly BAD writing, courtesy of my 8th graders. When I was searching my computer's hard drive for writing samples to send this person, the only things I could find were an academic paper on the history of education, a bunch of personal background essays that I'd written for teaching applications, and things like letters to parents, memos, cover-your-ass documents, etc. It dawned on me that I haven't written anything even semi-serious in at least 3 years, maybe longer.

I'll post a link to the magazine's website soon. I don't want to link to their site or have anyone searching their name land here-- at least until the first issue of the South Mississippi version is out and I've officially written something for them.