Month: June 2021

TWO JELLYFISH

Write City Magazine

Write City published my story today and I’m beyond thrilled because although it took me two tries, it was accepted. This is an excerpt from the first email I received: 

“We appreciate you letting us take a look at this story for possible publication in The Write City Magazine.  Usually we’ve got a straight up YES or a straight-up NO, but in the case of your story, it’s mixed.  We’d be open to seeing a revised version that addresses some of the editors’ concerns as follows: 

  1. One editor was not clear about the reference to “moon-shaped face” and would like you to be more specific about the child’s disability
  2. Another wanted a few more, deeper descriptions
  3. Perhaps the differences between the husbands could either be introduced earlier on, delved into more, or downplayed altogether, because the introduction of the husband’s different reactions felt a bit tacked on to the ending
  4. Something about the ending needs changed.  It didn’t hit us with the punch that the rest of the story did.  Perhaps you could develop it a bit more, reach some additional conclusions as to why this encounter was important compared to others the protagonist experienced and why it lingered so vividly. 

Like I said, if you want to consider our feedback, and resubmit, we’d love to take another look…”

I love a challenge so I revised, edited it another five times and showed it to my oldest daughter, Alia, who also stands in as my editor.  This is the first time I will be paid for something I wrote. I am so grateful! If you’d like to read the story, you can find the link under “Publications” in this website. 

There’s an important lesson here. I refuse to give up as I learn to do new things. I imagine it’s like learning how to juggle. Hard!

https://chicagowrites.org/write_city_magazine/766

writercommunity  memoir  disabilities parenting

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CELEBRATE! I wrote my first proposal for my book!

I think I am going to get my book published. This hasn’t been something I believed up until now. But I’m inching closer.

Last week, there was a writer’s pitch fest on Twitter. The objective of the event is for writers to ‘pitch’ their story in 280 characters or less. Don’t forget the hashtags. That’s very important in the posting. The next thing that writers hope will happen or expect to have happened is an agent tweets a heart. That means they liked your pitch and want you to send a query letter or a proposal or both. The first two times I participated in PitMad, it was not fun.

It’s a lot of pressure on a person to work hard at writing one sentence about their whole book, and then hoping, waiting for an agent to like it. It didn’t happen for me the first two times, which greatly upset me.

So I wasn’t going to do it last week but at the last minute, I hauled out an old pitch and posted it. An hour or so later, I pitched another one.

I got an instant heart from an agent. Not some jerk who didn’t follow the rules of PitMad. Lots of times you get a heart from random people. Don’t they realize they’re messing with your head when they do this?

But I got a heart. And wrote that proposal I’ve been putting off doing for two years.

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