WAITING FOR A YES

I recently finished the revisions on a short story about my mother. Mom died about six months ago, and I wanted to explore, for one last time, my complicated relationship with her. Last week, I sent out my story. Its title, is “I’ll Get You My Pretty: Growing Up in the Shadow of Oz.”

Will people want to read it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have portrayed my mother as some type of villain, even if she did have an uncanny resemblance to Margaret Hamilton, (the actress who portrayed the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz movie.) For many years, I thought this. It made me feel guilty. Not anymore.

When I finished the story, I submitted it to my desired top-tier journals. All either said no or never responded. I spent months on revisions. I begged my daughter to help. She read the passages. She gave honest feedback. I changed the angle of the story, worked with friends, and new editors, and came up with a new pitch.

In my pitch, I suggested that I would have done anything to make my mother happy. I emphasized how the complicated relationship I had with my mother damaged me, and how, as an adult, I found a way to take a fresh look at my childhood trauma, and its lasting impact, to finally come home to myself.  In the last week, I’ve had three rejections. It’s hard to predict how an editor will react to my story or the hundred other variables that can affect what's accepted and what's not. I know rejection is part of the publication process, but perseverance is key to success. The best thing I can do at this point is to decide if I should work on something else if this set of submissions fails.

I call myself a writer.