I’m mentoring a great newbie writer and editor here in the Seattle area. She has a couple of clips from some magazine work she lucked into, plus a lot of blog writing under her belt.

“My clips are from 2007 and 2008,” she wrote me in May ’09. “Do they still count as clips?”

You bet they do, Nicole.

I routinely submit articles that are 5-7 years old, if they hit a specific topic an editor wants me to have expertise in. Just because you didn’t write something yesterday doesn’t mean your clip can’t show you know about a subject, or know how to write a complex feature.

So dust off those clips and send ’em out!