cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Getting back A few weeks ago I wrote this piece up while I was half drunk about foraging for oysters on the Chesapeake Bay. I sent it off as a pitch to a big regional magazine and forgot about it. Last week, while I was driving back on another oyster gathering expedition, I got an email back from them. I saw the first few words in the app on my phone. "Thank you for your submission..." I assumed it was another blow-off and ignored it. Monday afternoon, I had another email from them, bumping it for a response. Holy shit, I sold a piece. for the first time in over a year. I read it again. Oh, how it sings. It is maybe the best piece of writing I will have published in years. It is a back page personal essay. With religious allusions and layers of shit that an English class could spend weeks unpacking. I mean, it's really fucking good. The staff of the magazine are raving about it. And I just tossed it off. I know that I am good. I worked my way up to that 1% of non-fiction writers and then I fucked it all up by doing civil rights stuff for a year. Nobody wanted to hire the guy who might attract an alt right nutbag who guns the whole newsroom down. It has been a struggle trying to get back to even close to where I was before. With the book that I have half written now, if I still had the platform that I had while I was writing for Sm1ths0nian then I would have a very low six figure deal immediately. I'm fighting to get back to even close to where I was. Back to a platform. I still have the ideas, the talent. My old editors have moved on, the email addresses I have for pitches are dead ends. I don't know how to get my work out there again. I'm fucking good. I'm working really hard to get my platform back. Finally, this is something. 12:43 a.m. - 2021-05-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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