Sweating As I Hit "Send"

And the email I received back right away

A few weeks ago, right before I got super sick, I went for a run while chatting on the phone with my friend Emily Halnon, who was on a much longer and tougher run up a butte in Eugene. She has already written a memoir, and she offered to share all the details of her path to publication and answer any questions I had. I only had about a million.

I’ve had these wireless headphones for years and never knew I could use them to talk on the phone while running. Life-changing information!

One thing that stuck out amongst the many wonderful insights Emily provided was that her relatively small platform made it tricky to elicit offers from publishers. This freaked me out because she’s published several essays in various publications and has nearly twelve times the number of Instagram followers I do. If her platform was almost too small, mine is nonexistent.

It seems foolish to start querying without even attempting to publish a few pieces of writing, so this week, I resolved to give it my best shot. I don’t know why I was so nervous—I guess it goes back to opening myself up to failure—but I was actively sweating as I hit “send” on my very first pitch email to an editor. Then I slammed my laptop shut and distracted myself by making lunch, as if a rejection might pop up right away if I continued staring at my inbox.

A few minutes into chopping my salad ingredients, though, I decided to check my email… just in case. I was sure there would be nothing. But there was something.

Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

My pitch bounced back as undeliverable! Cool, cool, cool. I love how the Google mailer-daemon thingy made sure to label my attempt as a failure. Thanks so much!

I have no clue why my email didn’t go through. I checked a thousand times that I sent it to the correct email address. The only thing I can think is that this editor has left the publication and their pitching guide hasn’t been updated yet.

I reached out to another friend who’s a well-established freelance writer and she suggested I send my pitch to another editor she knows at that publication and ask them to forward it to the correct person. So I did that. And I didn’t get a bounce-back email. But I also haven’t gotten any other kind of email.

I’ve managed to kind of forget I even sent it and go back to focusing on my sample chapter revisions, but I do hope I hear something eventually. Even if it’s “no.” As I wrote the pitch, I got pretty jazzed about the story I planned to tell, and I’d like to pitch it elsewhere so I can find it the right home.

Anyway. This was such a minor, embarrassing thing to get worked up about, but the whole point of this newsletter is to be super honest! I’m not here to play it cool and pretend like everything (or anything) comes easily to me. I am the opposite of cool—quite sweaty indeed—and working on building my confidence every day.

Hooray for therapy!

I started seeing a therapist in 2021 to help me cope with the grief of slowly losing my mother to early onset Alzheimer’s. (People always ask me how to find a therapist, so: I found my first therapist by Googling “Alzheimer’s therapist Seattle,” and I found my current therapist by using Psychology Today’s excellent Find a Therapist tool. It’s very helpful to be able to search for therapists who accept your insurance and specialize in the topic(s) you want to discuss.)

Over the years, I’ve also talked with my therapists about so many other things, including, but not limited to: my previous job, various family and friend dynamics, and all my hopes and dreams and fears surrounding this book project. My current therapist has been with me for the whole book ride, from “I think I need to quit my job” to “I quit my job!” to all the ups and downs I’ve shared here so far.

This week I expressed my hesitance to write about a particular aspect of my mom’s life, but I shared the context of why I felt it was important to include, and my therapist got it right way. She perfectly explained how it contributed to the high-level story, and I was like, “Yes, I’m on the right track, and also I’m going to steal the way you just explained that.”

I should really find a writing group where I can discuss these kinds of things so I can save my therapy time for, I don’t know, my mom’s imminent death? Adding it to my to-do list.