Sweet Acceptance
Last summer, I got my first short story acceptance. The feeling of “oh my god, they like me” was so overwhelming that it actually kept my ego churning along at a healthy clip for several weeks. Because let’s be real. After several years of submitting stories without any responses of “yes we like this and want to buy it” well, it can be hard to keep the faith. Such a small thing, acceptance for a short story. Just a little story. No big deal. But it was a big deal. It is. It still is. And since then, I’ve had one more acceptance. And now one of those two accepted stories has been published. It exists in the world on a printed page in a tiny journal that only a select group of readers and writers have ever heard of and I could not be more thrilled. I’m so fucking proud of my little story. And I’ll be proud when the other one comes out, which hopefully will be soon. And I’ll keep sending in my little stories to little magazines because this is how it works. Being a writer in today’s world.
Decades ago there were many fewer little magazines. And they were not so little. They had huge audiences. But there was no internet. And maybe fewer writers. Definitely fewer writers in terms of absolute numbers. The whole damn population was smaller. We’ve really outgrown this space we take up. But here we are, still writing. Still trying to get published.
I sometimes envy the writers of “back then” but then I think, no, I would have probably lived a very different life as a woman during those earlier times (pick your pre-internet decade). With fewer choices. Probably with several children that maybe I did not really want. Finding the time to write and submit stories to the few magazines out there would have been a luxury that I could not afford.
So despite the low pay and the vast numbers of other writers and the unlikelihood of ever actually being able to make a living doing this thing I love, I’ll keep going. And if I can just get one of those lovely “yes we like you” notes now and then, I’ll be good.
Oh…here’s where you can find the now-published short story, which, by the way, is called “Did You Pay for This Room?” It’s a horror story about a bitter middle-aged woman on a train and the strange child she meets there, and appears in Not One of Us, Issue #78.