Hello from the Writing Attic!

Where things have been a little more frantic than usual. I’ve had a lot of deadlines lately for a lot of really great freelance pieces that I’m excited to share with you all soon. I finished a draft of my novel last month (thank God) which always lets loose a slew of story ideas that have been patiently waiting in line.

I had told myself that I would go back to the novel in March to start looking at revisions, but I’m just not ready yet. I’m having way too much fun over here with the other ideas. When I’m deep in novel drafting, I tend to worry that all the ideas that are bubbling up won’t have that same shimmer when it’s their turn in the sun. But so far, that’s never been the case.

The lesson is eternal—Go where the love is. And right now, the love is with short stories… until the novel calls again.

That said, I have a full newsletter ahead. So let’s gossip.

Pitch Perfect: “Becoming Human Again: A Reading List for the Extremely Offline,” for Longreads

It’s been a minute since I did a Pitch Perfect edition of a Submission Success story. Since I’ve been on a lucky streak in that arena lately, I figured I’d share the process for this piece, which just went live today.

These days, if I pitch an idea, it’s usually going to be an idea around one of my obsessions. I’ve been slowly working on moving myself offline, specifically off social media for the past few months, and I’ve been…evangelizing…. about it. Rather than become that annoying voice that won’t shut up about surveillance capitalism, I took my voice to an editor’s inbox. This time, it worked out for me. Hooray!

Here’s how it went down:

I subscribe to Sonia Weiser’s Opportunities of the Week newsletter, where she sends a round-up of various pitch calls from editors on Twitter. (Very convenient for me as I am no longer on Twitter.) The newsletter is only $3 a month; since signing up for it in 2020, I have made ~7k in freelance income from the pitches I find on there alone. So yeah, it’s worth it.

In that newsletter, I saw a pitch call from Longreads stating that they were looking for pitches for their Reading List feature with a link to the guidelines on their site. I love Longreads and have always wanted to crack that nut.

The Pitch:

Hello there,

I saw the request for more reading list pitches and wanted to send this your way!

I’ve been on a mission this past year to become a human again—also known as a mission to delete my social media accounts.
Deleting accounts isn’t as easy as it sounds; I’m a writer and freelancer who frequently relies on Twitter for pitch calls (like this one) as well as the all-important Discourse of the Day. Facebook has become my rolodex of family and friends, my community bulletin board, and most depressingly, the only way to learn who is still alive and who has since died.

This is known as “social lock-in,” where networks monopolize our experiences and make it impossible to live social lives outside of the purview of the platform. It’s also a feature of surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to showcase how capitalism is no longer about controlling our purchase power but manipulating our human behavior at scale. No longer is capitalism simply about cornering the market on a household product regardless of harm; powerful (and largely unknown) players can now corner the market on democracy for the right price. According to Jaron Lanier, deleting our social media accounts is “the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times”—and it’s the only way to regain our humanity in an increasingly inhumane world.
I would like to write this essay, "Becoming Human Again: A Reading List for The Extremely Offline,” detailing how to break out of social lock-in and recreate our own worlds outside of social media, as well as my own personal experience of what it’s felt like to regain a sense of my humanity. And of course, this essay will include a reading list for those who would like to go from being Extremely Online to Extremely Offline.

As I’ve been on this journey of limiting my social media for the past year, I already have a strong list of books, podcasts, and essays to pull from, including “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” by Jaron Lanier, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman, and the podcast, “Your Undivided Attention,” from the Center for Humane Technology (the same group who produced the recent Social Dilemma documentary.)

As for me, you can no longer find me on Twitter or Facebook, but you can see a list of my recent bylines on my website. My essays published in The Rumpus, Romper, and Texas Highways give a good feel for my voice and style of essay writing.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Timeline:

I sent this pitch on Friday, January 21. I don’t usually send pitches on Fridays but I was excited. I didn’t hear anything, and so followed up on Tuesday, February 1. (“Hi there, Just checking in on this. Is there any interest in this pitch? Thank you!”) I received an email from the editor on Friday, February 4 saying that she loved the pitch, wanted to see a draft, and gave me a price and a deadline.

Writing/Editing Process:

Here’s the fun part where you learn that I am a dummy and a human and made a mistake and I STILL didn’t get “blacklisted” from Longreads forever because that doesn’t actually happen. (Unless you really shit the bed. Never say never.)

I sent a draft that originally included a reading list of books, podcasts, and documentaries. The editor politely emailed me back and said that since they were Longreads, their reading lists had to include only long-form journalism. (Y’know, LONGREADS.) She sent me a copy of their submission guidelines. D’oh! I rewrote the entire piece over a weekend and sent a new draft, which she accepted.

The piece went through two rounds of basic copyediting, nothing major.

On March 9, the piece went live and I got paid.

Pay: $350

Read it here.

Must-Reads:

I have two Must-Reads for you this week!

“The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon” by Anna Holmes for the New Yorker — There is a lot to love in this piece but my favorite thing is how thoroughly the writer described the genius it takes to write an excellent picture book. I have met a ton of adults who think they can whip out a picture book without much thought because, well, it’s a picture book for kids. This piece blasts that myth apart.

Brown was most taken by the idea of writing for five-year-olds. “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again,” she once wrote in a notebook. In a paper on the topic, she argued that a child of that age enjoys a “keenness and awareness” that will likely be subdued out of him later in life. She went on, “Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. . . . ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ ‘Quiet as electricity rushing about the world,’ ‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he can.”

“What We Lose When We Lose Literary Magazines” by Lincoln Michel for his Counter Craft Substack — Lincoln Michel has been on a tear lately. I am loving everything he’s putting out (shoutout also to his recent informative article about book advances in the latest Poets and Writers) and if it’s not completely clear, I highly recommend you subscribe to his newsletter. I liked this article though because I often get this question in my business classes: “What’s the point of publishing in literary journals if no one reads them and none of them pay you?”

Literary magazines aren’t mere stepping stones of course, but they are a testing ground. A place where we writers get to see how our work will be received outside of friends, family members, or workshops where people feel obligated to read and respond. They’re also a place to experiment and push ourselves in new directions.

Celebrations Required!

• Congratulations to writer friend, Kim Baldwin, on her latest essay, “Be In The Picture” in the Nashville Scene! A must-read for all the people pleasers out there.

! Access the Newsletter Archive !

One final word — it occurs to me that people new to the newsletter might like to be able to read past issues. All past issues of the newsletter are available here.

And send some of your people-pleasing friends this way, why don’t cha?