{"id":219,"date":"2008-03-13T17:37:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2008\/03\/13\/an-unnamed-magazine-in-another-part-of-the-forest\/"},"modified":"2008-03-13T17:37:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-13T17:37:00","slug":"an-unnamed-magazine-in-another-part-of-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2008\/03\/13\/an-unnamed-magazine-in-another-part-of-the-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unnamed Magazine in Another Part of the Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just read Jason’s blog on how to write for magazines<\/a> and Danny’s<\/a> on many things but in part memories of approaching Empire film magazine.<\/p>\n

And I’ve got to tell you this, but I’m going to claim this is about An Unnamed Magazine.<\/p>\n

Years ago, I pitched a feature idea to AUM and the response was pretty good; it was a not-now-but-maybe-later response. These days I’d take that as a straight no but I was young, I was new, I believed AUM and was encouraged. After a suitable interval, I tried again.<\/p>\n

Same thing.<\/p>\n

I was beginning to see the light but three months later or something, when I had no one else to pitch to, I figured, what the hell? I gave ’em a call, fully expecting to get an answering machine, rattle off some rubbish into it, and then never think of AUM ever again.<\/p>\n

You’re thinking they commissioned me, aren’t you?<\/p>\n

And you’re right.<\/p>\n

But not only did they commission me, they had already commissioned me. My copy was due in less than a week’s time, they just hadn’t ever mentioned it to me.<\/p>\n

I took time off whatever else I was doing, did all the legwork, wrote the feature, filed the copy bang on time – and learnt that the issue was dropping a few pages. Happens all the time, though usually you know when in the year it’s going to happen so you’re not often caught out over-commissioning pages. But my feature was bumped back to the next issue and since AUM is a monthly, I could’ve had about five weeks to write this quite involved feature instead of five days.<\/p>\n

The feature went down very well and actually did me some good outside AUM too. And for a little while I would call the editor, pitching further ideas. None of them ever sold.<\/p>\n

Well, not so far as I know.<\/p>\n

William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just read Jason’s blog on how to write for magazines and Danny’s on many things but in part memories of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-3x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}