Rachel Hills was the third Ambassador to speak at the Emerging Writers Festival. Rachel’s a widely published journalist and editor. She’s also an awesome blogger (with many of her articles available to view) and posts interesting tweets linking to interesting articles. I wish I was half as retweetable as her. I was excited to finally meet her, having met her virtually years and years ago when she was working on a story about labiaplasty (now that’s a long story).

Rachel has in her fabulous blogging way put up a transcript of her full talk, you may find it interesting to see the difference between what I distilled and what she said. The distillery says:

• It is about who you know and how you’re known; this doesn’t mean being a suckup, but consistently doing work. Become known for producing good work and hitting deadlines
• Submit now. Don’t hold yourself back with artificial barriers or thinking you have to jump through unspoken hoops before submitting to a publication.
• You need to work hard
• Write for publications you enjoy reading and what you want to read
• Know your mag. Read a publication before you submit to it. Know the voice of the publication and pitch a specific story and angle to a specific mag.
• Learn to leverage what you’ve already done and know. Build on your strengths, you have some.
• Getting where you want to be will take longer than you think.

Tomorrow – it’s Ambassador David Milroy.