Monday Morning Blue.

I got to have my 5-mo-old niece (and her mom, my sister, and dad, as well as my other sister) for a weekend visit. We went to the horse races on Friday night and then out shopping on Saturday and it was so fun that Monday morning seems rather blah. I mean, there's no cooing, drooling darling to giggle at this morning.

Today starts the Freelance Success Summer Query Challenge that will run into August. This is when a bunch of professional writers (I think around 40 or so) divide into teams and write blizzards of magazine article or essay queries or letters of introduction (LOIs) to new magazines or corporate writing prospects for points. The most points wins the challenge.

It is usually a heady time, with us writers taking huge risks and sending half-baked query ideas out to as many markets as possible (at least for me). But a lot of writers actually get a lot of writing business from these and end up surpassing monthly or yearly goals.

As for me, I'm concentrating mostly on essays, book reviews, and corporate clients, with the occasional article query thrown in. (I am still not a 30-minute query writer yet.) My natural writing style is the essay and book review, so I hope to sell all those essays I've been working on this spring.

My quick point earner will be the corporate work, however. I intend to contact multiple corporate clients for my bulk points.

I just have to work really hard for the morning and half of the afternoon for my daily work and then the rest of the day I can write. Einstein did this in his patent office job. He was able to complete all his patent work in just two hours in the morning and spent the rest of the day on his own experiments and writing. He won the Nobel prize while still employed at the patent office.

Keep moving forward.