Hello from the Writing Attic!

Where there is a book in progress! Again. Forever. This is still the second book I’m working on. If you know anything about me, you know I hate drafting with a passion. I hate creating something from nothing. And creating a novel with whole characters and worlds and pasts and traumas… it’s a lot. So it requires a lot of starts and stops. And it requires a lot of time and patience and especially, patience with the brain that’s coming up with all this crazy shit.

For now, the brain is happy to oblige and is in the zone for drafting. I’ll take it.

But for now, let’s take a brain break and let’s gossip.

Submission Success Story — “Taming Wild Animals” for Charlotte Donlon’s A Curious Approach

I love this odd bird of a piece but as I kept submitting it, it was clear it was a hard sell for most places. Half craft essay, half personal essay—it didn’t fit among the places that accepted craft pieces and it felt a little too on the nose for creative nonfiction (it’s pretty hard to make a personal essay on writing break out of the pack.)

But one day I was scrolling through Sonia Weiser’s opportunity newsletter and saw the tweet from Charlotte looking for pieces just like mine—and she paid an honorarium. So I sent it—and she loved it!

It didn’t end up in a big time publication but Charlotte treated the piece with kind eyes and added her own spin as a follow-up discussion at the end, which made it all the more sweeter.

Here are the details:

Total time spent on submission: 1 year, 2 months, 13 days

Response time from Charlotte: About a half hour
Total rejections received before an acceptance: 48 (3 close calls, 10 higher tier form, the rest form)
Pay: $30

Read it here.

Must-Have Resource: Gotham Writers

I’m feeling the love for Gotham Writers Workshop right now. I took a feature writing class with them (online) this past spring and it was so informative! I’d never taken a true journalism class before and there were so many new things I learned that I never would have picked up on the job (unless an editor decided to teach me in the moment.)

The instructor was kind and thoughtful, the price was alright, and I wrote the feature profile for Business Insider while taking the class, which helped immensely.

Check out their classes here.

So long, farewell!

(Psst… Like what you read in this newsletter? Toss a tip in the virtual tip jar. Venmo: @lisabubert)