Image by rony michaud from Pixabay
For the last year and a half I’ve been so focused on novels—planning them, writing them, editing them, pitching them— that I’ve neglected my short stories and essays. I realized recently that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve had anything published, largely because I stopped trying. Not wanting to break a nine-year streak of seeing my stories online, I temporarily set aside the novel manuscripts in favor of going on submission with the shorter stuff.
In the process I discovered some great new magazines. One in particular, Reservoir Road Literary Review, seemed like it might be a good fit for my work. They were looking for stories “full of grit and discomfort that shed sympathetic light on the questionable, the unfavorable.” I had a story like that—a flash creative nonfiction piece called “Transient” that I penned way back in 2017. It’s about how we remember those whose choices in critical moments can alter forever the course of our lives. I polished up the essay, hit submit, and crossed my fingers.
Within weeks I received a warm acceptance email that did wonders for my confidence (something easy to lose when you’ve spent over a year searching for a literary agent). There’s nothing like the feeling of your story finding a home. I missed that feeling.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.
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