9 Lit Mags Said No...

…but number 10, the best one, said yes. So I sold one of my favorite essays written in the last two years to The Smart Set.

How did it happen?

I was sitting in my study one afternoon with my spouse talking about how lucky I felt that so many of my personal essays had been accepted in a year and a half. I had turned to writing shorter work during the pandemic after putting aside a difficult novel I’d already interrupted once before.

The first time, before the pandemic, the publisher of my most recent Nick Hoffman mystery State University of Murder asked me when I would be offering another. Who says no to an invitation and a contract? So even though I was well into a dark stand-alone novel about family and trauma, I rejoined my professor sleuth in the crazy world of academia. That’s one of the best things about writing a series: you get to spend time with old friends.

Over the course of nine books (and three publishers) poor Nick had been the object of harassment, stalking, and almost been killed in a mass shooting. On top of that, he was disliked by most of the faculty in his department for many reasons, not least because a former student had left money for a fund in his honor, a fund he would administer, a fund that would bear his name. And that gift provided him with a larger office and his own secretary, setting him apart from everyone else in the department, even his writer-in-residence spouse, Stefan.

So what could happen to him next, I wondered? In other words, what was I going to plague my quip-happy amateur sleuth with, aside from the expected murder case he would inevitably be drawn into? The answer came swiftly: why not make him the chair of the department in a bizarre turn of events? Give him a position he never wanted and make him the focus of the fractious, egotistical faculty’s complaints, demands, and delusions.

Inspired by the current state of academia which is almost beyond satire, I wrote Department of Death, was pleased with the reviews, and I let go of the series for good.

The second time I stopped working on the stand-alone novel, I was leery about undertaking the research travel I needed to do to finish the book, given COVID. But like many people during that time, I also found myself turning inwards in new ways. Essay ideas came to me in my dreams, in the middle of the night, in the shower, walking the dogs. They came to me nonstop and I wrote about my mother, my father, my migraines, travel, traveling while disabled, teaching in London and much, much more. At last count, I had past fifty publications and acceptances (including some reprints).

Anyway, here’s my latest family personal essay, somewhat late because I had so much going on in the spring that I forgot to check the pub date: “My Brother is Toast.” I think it’s one of the best of my essay publications in the last two years. The title changed with every other rejection and I tweaked the piece here and there, but it’s substantially the same essay that nine lit mags rejected without comment or even an invitation to try again.

I couldn’t be prouder to be in the tenth, whose editor contacted me as soon as she read it.

The lesson: persistence is crucial in the face of rejection.

(Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay, illustration by Felicia Wolfer)