Over this weekend, Chicago freelancer Anne Ford will be blogging from the 12th Chicago Writers & Editors / One-on-One conference (which is co-chaired by MBToolBox guest-blogger Annie Logue.) Here's her first installment:

When I got the e-mail about a month ago telling me a
spot at the Magazine Writers and Editors One-on-One
Conference here in Chicago had opened up and I was
next on the waiting list, I hit "reply" so fast I
nearly broke my wrist. The 60 slots at this annual
conference, where writers meet individually with
editors from magazines such as Family Circle and
Runner's World, fill up within a couple of weeks, so I
felt a little bit like Cinderella getting a
last-minute Evite to the ball. And since I'm going
full-time freelance in a month, this seemed like the
perfect dive into the pitching pool.

Speaking of pitching: I've already commiserated with
other attendees about how intimidating formal querying
can be. I got nearly all of my clips by e-mailing an
editor I already knew and asking, "How about a story
on X?" As another participant pointed out, this
approach is unlikely to fly at Woman's Day.

Today the editors are talking about what kind of
articles they're looking for, what they have too much
of already, what you should never even think about
pitching to them, how fast they usually reply, and all
the other questions that go through my head when I'm
flipping through magazines I want to write for. This
morning the editor of Parenting even went through her
book page-by-page for us. I would probably have paid
the $500 conference fee just for that.