Welcome to my desk. It's a door on two filing cabinets in the spare bedroom, and it's where I've earned my living for the last seven years writing for trade magazines, company newsletters and a regional parenting paper. Nobody's going to mistake me for a rich woman, but the bills get paid, I haven't worn pantyhose on a weekday since 1992, and the commute is eleven steps.

I started this page because I get the same questions over and over at the library writers' group and from people who read my byline and think it's glamorous. (It isn't. It's a lot of index cards.) So here's what I actually know, in the order people usually ask.

A query is a one-page business letter that asks an editor if she'd like to see an article you haven't written yet. That's the whole secret of freelancing for magazines: with a very few exceptions (humor, fiction, some first-person essays), you don't write the piece and then hunt for a home. You sell the idea first. It saves everybody's time, and an editor who says yes will usually tell you exactly what length and angle she wants, which makes the piece better.

Mine follow the same four paragraphs every time. It's not fancy, but it's gotten me work from editors who've never heard of me.

1. The hook. Open with the first sentence of the article you'd like to write, or the surprising fact it's built on. Not "I am writing to inquire whether you would be interested." She knows why you're writing. Show her you can write.
2. The pitch. What the article is, in two or three sentences: the angle, roughly how long (match what the magazine actually runs), who you'll interview, and which section of the magazine it belongs in. Name the section. It proves you've read the thing.
3. Why you. Two sentences, three at most. Relevant clips, relevant experience, or the fact that you're the only person who's talked to the county's last remaining blacksmith. If you have nothing, skip it gracefully; don't apologize.
4. The close. "I can have this to you within three weeks of your go-ahead. Thank you for your time." Then your name, address, phone and e-mail, and a self-addressed stamped envelope in the envelope. Yes, still. Most editors answer by mail, and if you don't include an SASE some of them simply won't answer at all.

A few other things I've learned the expensive way:

• Address a real person by name. The masthead is right there in the front of the magazine. Call the switchboard and ask how to spell it. Editors change jobs constantly, so a six-month-old masthead may already be wrong.
• One page. If it doesn't fit on one page you don't understand your own idea yet.
• Send one or two clips (photocopies of published work), never a stack.
• Give it six to eight weeks, then send a polite one-paragraph follow-up. After that, send the idea somewhere else. Silence is an answer.
• Get the current Writer's Market from the library every year. It lists thousands of magazines with what they pay, what they want, and whether they take queries by e-mail yet (more do every year, but plenty still want paper).
• Read at least three issues before you query anyone. I cannot stress this enough. My first rejection, in 1992, was for pitching a magazine an article on something it had run as a cover story two months before.

People want a number, so here are the ranges I actually see, in 1999, in my corner of the business. Yours may differ.

A few realities. Pay is usually "on publication," which can be months after you turn the piece in, so you are always working for money you'll see next season. Ask for "on acceptance" and sometimes you'll get it. Keep a cushion. Every editor who has ever paid me late was very nice about it.

Also: read the contract. "All rights" means they own it forever and you can't resell it. "First North American serial rights" means they get to print it first and it comes back to you. Some magazines now ask for electronic rights too, so they can put your article on their Web site; think about what that's worth before you sign it away for nothing.

I have tried tracking submissions in a spreadsheet twice. Both times I stopped updating it within a month. What works for me is a shoebox of 4x6 index cards, one card per idea, and it has worked since 1993.

The front of the card says the working title and a one-line summary. Below that, a line for every place I've sent it: the magazine, the editor's name, the date sent, the date they answered, and the answer (Yes, No, or a note like "no, but try us again in spring"). If it sells, I write the fee, the due date, the date I mailed the piece, the date it ran and the date the check came. The back of the card has source names and phone numbers.

The box has four dividers: Ideas (not queried yet), Out (waiting to hear), Assigned (sold, working on it), and Done (paid). Every Monday morning I go through Out and anything older than eight weeks gets a follow-up or gets sent somewhere else. Every idea in Ideas gets sent to at least one place a month or it goes in the trash.

The rule that makes it work: an idea that comes back goes right back out the same day. Different market, same day. Don't take it personally, don't let it sit on the desk for a week looking at you. Most of what I've sold went to the second or third place I tried. One piece on small-town Fourth of July parades sold on the sixth try, four years after I first pitched it.

Standard warning: I'm a writer, not an accountant. This is what I've learned from doing it and from paying a real accountant once a year to check my work, which I recommend.

• Nobody withholds anything from a freelance check. You get the whole amount, and it feels wonderful, and then in April you owe income tax on all of it plus self-employment tax (that's your Social Security and Medicare, both halves, since you're the employer and the employee). The first year I didn't know that. It was a bad April.
• So you pay quarterly estimated taxes on Form 1040-ES. The due dates are April 15, June 15, September 15 and January 15. I just mailed the September one. I keep a separate savings account and move a percentage of every check into it the day it arrives, before I can think of it as money.
• Your business income and expenses go on Schedule C. Keep every receipt: paper, printer ribbons, postage (a lot of postage, see SASE above), long-distance calls to sources, the magazines you subscribe to for research, the Writer's Market, mileage to interviews.
• The home office deduction is real, but the room has to be used regularly and exclusively for the business. My spare bedroom qualifies because it has a desk, a fax and a cat in it, and no bed. Your accountant will tell you whether it's worth it in your case.
• Magazines that pay you $600 or more in a year send you a Form 1099 in January. The IRS gets a copy too. Report everything either way.

You need much less than the catalogs say. My whole office, as of September 1999:

• A Pentium 166 with 32 megabytes of memory, bought in 1997, running Windows 95. It is not fast. It doesn't need to be; words are small. I back up to floppies every Friday and keep the disks in a cookie tin at my sister's house, because the one thing that would actually put me out of business is a fire.
• WordPerfect. I've used it since the blue-screen DOS days and I'm not switching. Editors occasionally want a Word file, and WordPerfect will save as one, so that's settled. (Reveal Codes is the best feature ever put in a word processor, and I'll argue that with anyone.)
• A fax machine on its own phone line. Half my editors still send contracts and marked-up galleys by fax, and it's how I send a signed contract back the same afternoon.
• A 33.6 modem and an e-mail account. More editors take queries and finished pieces by e-mail every year, and my newsletter clients send me their material that way. I'd like a 56K modem but the lines out here don't do it justice.
• A microcassette recorder for phone interviews (with the little suction-cup pickup), and I always tell the person I'm taping. Always.
• An inkjet printer, good paper for query letters, a box of #10 envelopes, a roll of stamps, and a postage scale I got at a yard sale.
• The reference shelf: a good dictionary, the AP Stylebook, the Chicago Manual, this year's Writer's Market, and a three-ring binder of every style sheet an editor has ever sent me.
• Coffee. A second pot after lunch is not a crime.

Her name is Deadline. She is eleven, orange, and the only coworker I've had since 1992. She was a stray who showed up the week I quit my job, which my husband says is a bad sign about the kind of company I keep.

Duties include: sitting on the fax as it warms up, sitting on whichever page of notes I need next, sitting on the keyboard whenever a query is nearly finished (she has sent one to an editor, unsigned, by stepping on the right key at the wrong time; I got the assignment anyway), and staring at the window during phone interviews in a way that makes it very hard to keep a straight face.

She has met every deadline since 1992 by the simple method of not having any. I am thinking of promoting her.