Today’s guest post comes from Jim.

I have only had one job where I was paid as a writer. Somehow, about 20 years ago, I got a call from a magazine that covers gardening asking me if I would like to be their regional gardening correspondent for zone 4. It could be that they remembered contacting me a couple of times regarding the collection of spinach seed that I was offering through the Seed Saver’s Exchange. I had done some unpaid articles that were published a few places and was pleased to have the opportunity.

I was familiar with the job because I was a regular reader of the magazine and had even used tips given by previous zone 4 correspondents. I went right to work providing the same kind of advice that I had received. Actually, if you look at what is published for gardening tips, it seem everyone is stealing from everyone else because they are all saying about the same thing.

There was very little editing of what I wrote and I got almost no feed back. Occasionally I got carried away and put in some of my own rather rambling thoughts on gardening. Things started to change. At first I was published in the magazine. Latter the regional correspondents were left out of the printed magazine and only published online. The editors were in the process of spiffing up their publication and they were moving away from the old approach where the advice from people like me was a regular feature. I think some of those rambling articles I wrote gave them a clue that I wasn’t a very polished writer. They still have regional correspondents in their online publication. I’m not one of them.

It was the magazine’s old folksy approach that appealed to me, but it isn’t surprising that they wanted to go to a more polished style to fit in with all the other glossy magazines on the market. I did run into a couple of people who read what I wrote and liked it, and I talked to one of the old editors who was let go when they changed their style and he thought the old way was better, too.

But he didn’t even recall that I had been a correspondent during the time that he was the editor.

When have you expected someone to remember you, but they didn’t?