Today I was listening to the CD of the Nieman session I mentioned in my post, and I was struck by something else that Dan Baum said. He wasn’t simply talking about pitching the meaty stories — he was talking about the notion that most freelancers aim too low when they query. “I started writing for the big magazines when I was writing for the small ones,” he said — meaning The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Atlantic, Harpers, etc. He went on to say that editors at those publications — dream pubs for many of us — are dying for good queries from good writers. The implication: we writers stop ourselves from achieving our dreams. We are our own worst gatekeepers. I’m going to keep this bit of advice in mind.