Hold me and tell me I’m pretty…pretty talented

Amy Cissell
April 13, 2015
Write Now!
443

Okay, internets. Today is part three of a three-part scary thing that’s been happening this year.

Scary Part 1: The First Scare

In January, I sent an essay off to a real publication in the hopes that when they rejected me, it wouldn’t be too harsh. It was a second submission for this essay, and I’d reworked it mightily since its first rejection.

I then promptly put it out of my mind and did my best to forget about it. I put a reminder in my calendar to maybe follow up in about 8 weeks and then deliberately thought of other things. (Like impromptu trips to South Dakota.)

Scary Part 2: The Elation-Laced Scare

Less than two weeks later, I got an email from the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine letting me know that my essay had been selected for publication. She also said many nice things. I was pretty freaking excited. I’ve had a couple short short fiction pieces published in “inaugural issues” of publications that had, at best, about 3 issues. This publication has a leetle more staying power. Also money. They have money.

Then, an editor was assigned to work with me to make my essay better. That was terrifying. And awesome. And she really did make it so much better. It was my first experience working with an editor and it was great. Scary.

We did two big rounds of edits and a couple little “clarifying questions” type of edits. All of the easy things she did (like punctuation stuff and consistency stuff) was easy. It was the hard questions of “how were you feeling when this was happening?” and “can you make that more” that were the scary bits.

And now, a couple of months later, here we are.

Scary Part 3:The Scarening

So, today is publication day. My essay has been published. It is out there on the “Web Exclusives” section of this magazine’s website. With my words and my name and my author bio at the end.

In addition to it being scary because they’re my words, the essay is deeply personal.

But now, I’m going to put on my big-girl pants and share the link. This is both exhilarating (I’m an author!) and frightening (you might judge me!).

I feel that logically, other people liked the writing enough to publish it, so it’s probably not horrible. But logic is not working on me right now.

Deep breath.

My essay (currently one of four on the mag’s home page…ahhhh!) published in Brain, Child’s web exclusive section today!