I wanted to shout out to two fellow writers before I move onto my shameless plug... First, kudos to Kristen Fischer , whose book, Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs, just went on sale. Read my interview with Kristen here , and buy her book from Amazon . Seriously, people, I haven't read it yet, but I'm sure it's chock full of useful information for all of us. Also, Deb Ng's fabulous blog, Freelance Writing Jobs, is having a Google rankings issue. I got an assignment based on one of her leads just this morning, so it truly is a great resource and deserves tons and tons of traffic!And now time for Susan's monthly Query Challenge update... This month I sent out a total of twenty-one queries and received four assignments with one possible assignment for the summer. Doesn't sound like a lot, but sometimes it still feels like "uh oh, now I actually have to write 1,200 words on X topic. Do I even have 1,200 words to write? I guess I got caught up in query fever." (Coming from a PR background, queries are fun for me to write, but don't worry, I always have stuff to say when it comes down to it.) However, I don't think those numbers tell the whole story. For starters, one of the magazines I queried had stopped publishing but still had "2007 writer's guidelines" posted on their website. A men's magazine editor was really jazzed about my ideas for a dating column... that is, until he discovered that I live in Boston and couldn't "just pop by" his Manhattan office later that day. C'est la vie!